


Yakuza

by engineerleopoldfitz (aching_for_distance), sakurazawa



Series: Yakuza-verse [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-05
Updated: 2014-01-05
Packaged: 2018-01-07 15:09:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1121316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aching_for_distance/pseuds/engineerleopoldfitz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakurazawa/pseuds/sakurazawa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma is kidnapped from the Bus, prompting a rescue mission from the infamous Japanese Yakuza - and for FitzSimmons to admit what everyone else knows... They can't live without each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yakuza

_Fitz,_

_I don’t know how to start this. I don’t know what to say at all. I’ve been given an ultimatum, and I can’t I don’t know what my side of the bargain might entail. What I do know is that I probably won’t be able to come back._

_Make sure Agent Coulson tells my dad first. Take care of the team. There’s more I want to say, but I can’t leave you with it. I wanted my last words to you to be a quote. Something Marie Curie said that has always kept me going._

_“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”_

_I’ve changed my mind about that. Not about that quote, but about what I want my last words to you to be. I can’t say them. I can’t even write them. But you know what they are, I think._

_I’m so, so sorry._

_Your Jemma_

Fitz crumpled the letter in his fist. He couldn’t believe it. She wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye. This letter couldn’t be it. Not after everything they’d gone through together. What the hell did she mean, an ultimatum? From S.H.I.E.L.D.? Was she sick again? There were too many questions and her little note didn’t answer _any_ of them.

He looked down at his hand and swore, quickly opening the note back up and smoothing it out as best he could. That last bit… he _knew_ what she wanted to say. The same thing he’d wanted to tell her from the day they’d met, but he’d never worried about it, always thought there would be time. Fitz sucked in a breath and tipped his head back, eyes glossed in the bright glare of the lab’s lights.

_His_ Jemma. His for just this one moment, only now, when she was gone and out of his reach.

She wouldn’t have needed the added incentive of the AK-47 to climb onto the jet, but it certainly didn’t encourage slowness. Jemma clenched her jaw, refusing to show the fear that settled deep in her belly as she was directed to sit across from the stately Dr. Sakurai. The woman was about her height, fine-boned, and everything about her was crisp and fine-polished.

"Good morning, Simmons-sensei," she said. Her pronunciation of Jemma’s name was strange. "I apologize for the rudeness of my men’s search, but it was imperative we make sure you were not being tracked."

Jemma gave a tight nod, trying to put the humiliation of the search from her mind. “I did what you asked,” she said. “No one even knows I left the plane. Disarm the bomb.”

Dr. Sakurai’s nude lipstick shimmered as her lips tucked into a small smile. “Not yet, I think. We still have much to discuss regarding your duties with the Hono-o Corporation.”

Jemma’s fists clenched in the handcuffs. She needed to ask something else, to say something—anything—that would ensure she hadn’t sacrificed her freedom and, worse, her integrity, in vain. But she doubted if Dr. Sakurai would ever stop threatening her team and her family. And as long as she had the strings of their fate in her possession, she had Jemma under her thumb.

"What precisely are you expecting me to do?" she asked.

Dr. Sakurai smiled. “Research, of course.” She snapped her fingers, and a middle-aged man approached with a bottle of champagne and two crystal flutes. As he bent to place one of the flutes on the tray next to Jemma, the end of a sleeve tattoo peeked from his suit cuff.

~*~

It took another minute or two for Fitz to come to his senses. Jemma wouldn't have left like this. Not on her own. He bolted from the lab and up the stairs, stumbling twice on the way and continuing heedless of the bloody gash left on his shin the second time. "Ward!" he started babbling when he rounded a corner and launched head on at the other agent. "Where's Coulson? Someone took Jemma! Look a' this! Makes no sense! She wouldn't just leave the Bus and no' tell anyone!

"Whoa, whoa! Stop. Fitz, stop!" Ward had to grab onto the younger man's narrow shoulders and give him a small shake to break off the stream of words. "What are you on about?"

"This!" Fitz thrust the letter into Ward's face. "This is _no'_ like Jemma and you know i'!"

Ward took the note with a scowl, "I can't say that until I read it, monkey. Give me a minute." He skimmed the words and his scowl deepened to a more serious frown. "No, it's not like her. May!" Ward called down the hall where the other specialist was quietly eavesdropping. "Coulson in his office?"

"Of course. We need to track down a wayward biochemist?" The Asian woman's voice was as expressionless and unaffected as ever and it made Fitz want to throw things. At least Ward was showing _some_ signs of concern. Fitz snatched the note back and headed for Coulson's office, the other two following behind. He stomped into the senior agent's office and rattled off nearly the same thing he'd told Ward, with the same reaction from Coulson and the addition of "If you ever barge into my office like this again, I'll block you from the lab for a week, Fitz. I'm going to pretend it didn't happen this time, understand?"

Fitz looked at little sheepish at the rebuke and shuffled his feet, "Yes, sir."

"Good." Coulson looked at Ward and May, "Start working on this. She can't have been gone long."

~*~

"To the future of humanity," Dr. Sakurai said, raising her glass of champagne, which trailed tiny bubbles like stars. Jemma clenched her jaw and didn’t raise the flute to her lips. Dr. Sakurai’s dark eyes crinkled, her lips curving in mirth around the glass rim. She lowered the flute in her perfectly-manicured hand and leaned forward, her thick white suit jacket straining only slightly at the mother-of-pearl button. "Do you not wish the people of Earth a future?"

A shiver passed down Jemma’s back, the chill raising hairs on her arms and tightening the skin across her chest. She pressed her lips. “I have a feeling my version of the future is fundamentally different from yours.”

"How would you know? I have not even told you what it is."

"My version of the future doesn’t include people like you in power."

Dr. Sakurai gave a short, sweet laugh and reaching out her hand with its glossy pink nails, pressing it on Jemma’s knee. “What makes you think I am after power?”

"I’ve never heard of someone threatening a person’s friends and family for anything else."

Still smiling, Dr. Sakurai tilted her head, gazing at Jemma like a precocious pet. She patted her knee. “I read a book in which one character, a mentor, says to her mentee, ‘You have insufficient experience with depravity’. Sensei, I believe that may also be your flaw. There are people who must be willing to break the law, to harm and injure and sacrifice their moral integrity, for the good of all. What matters more: a group of people who have already pledged their lives and freedom to protecting the earth, or the earth itself? If you truly wish to save the world, Sensei, it will not be with S.H.I.E.L.D.. Callous as they often are, they are too concerned with doing right to really ensure humanity’s survival.”

Jemma snorted. “You haven’t met the Cavalry.”

"I haven’t poisoned that champagne. Drink, and we will talk of how you can save your friends."

Jemma’s heart skipped, but she lifted her glass and took a sip.

~*~

It didn't take long for the team to figure out that whoever had taken Jemma had been professional and experienced. Even Skye's computer skills couldn't restore the missing surveillance footage from where the abductors had disabled the Bus' cameras. However, the small military base where they were currently parked had a private CCTV feed which Skye had absolutely no hesitation in hacking into to fill in the blanks. While there was definite evidence these videos had also been tampered with, they were able to piece together what had happened. Fitz buried his face in his hands, unable to watch as Jemma was frog-marched off the Bus, a dark hood over her head and a very large, menacing looking gun dug into her back. "We have t' ge' her back," he said, looking around at Coulson, Ward and May's stony expressions.

Skye immediately chimed in her support, but Coulson gave them both pause, "Keep digging. We need to know where they took her. Skye, there should be more cameras along the fenceline of the base. They had to take her out somewhere. Find it." He hated the inaction, but there was nothing to be done without knowing where they were going - and what they might expect to find at the other end.

~*~

Three glasses of champagne left her lightheaded, but helped to calm the crazed nerves. Bizarrely, Jemma found herself able to concentrate better on observing her surroundings the way May had described they should do in this sort of situation. The jet was small, fit for no more than twelve passengers, if she were to guess, and their attendants were all in suits rather than uniforms. More than one of the men had tattoos peeking from their sleeves, tattoos that seemed to end at their wrists like skin-tight sleeves.

She was certain they were Yakuza. Or, at least, that they had been. Was it possible that a Yakuza clan was funding a private scientific research facility? From what she understood of Japanese culture, the law-enforcement would do little to disturb them as long as the general peace was not disrupted by their actions.

If she could get some kind of coded message out on the net, she was certain Skye would find it…

No. No, she couldn’t do that. If the team found her, or Dr. Sakurai found that she had attempted to escape, it would mean death, possibly even torture, for everyone she loved.

But the name Sakurai—she felt as though she had heard it mentioned before, in SciOps. Fitz might have remembered.

But Fitz wasn’t here.

Suddenly, the full weight of what that meant crashed down on her. Fitz wasn’t here. He never would be. She wouldn’t hear his Scottish accent tumbling words over so they all sounded that much more intense. She would never stare, impressed by the strength and precision of his hands as he worked, or feel the calluses catch in her hair, like when he carefully picked the crumbled stars of shattered windscreen from it just last week, one hand cradling her neck so she wouldn’t move and cause him to hurt her.

She remembered the heat that always radiated from him even six inches away. Even at the Academy, he’d been a human furnace, and he’d never pushed away her cold hands when she shoved them in his coat pockets or put them on his neck, no matter how grumpily he complained. His hands had always covered hers, or rubbed her arms. Once, when she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder on the train to Glasgow, she’d woken up warm for the first time in what felt like weeks, because he’d put an arm around her. Only her toes had been cold.

She should have told him. She was glad she hadn’t. But she should have.

"We will land in Japan in an hour, sensei," Dr. Sakurai said. "Have you ever visited?"

"No," she said, and the word came out watery, with a dizzy sort of drawl.

"Ah. But you have heard, I think, of Tokugawa Ieyasu?"

The name rang a bell. “The leader of the Shogun?”

"Very impressive. Yes. We will be landing in the Tohoku region. If you have an interest, perhaps I will show you where his bones are buried—there are wonderful carvings at the Toushougu shrine, and it is the perfect time of year to see… what do you say in English? Autumn leaves?"

She swallowed, nodded, too tired to snap that she wasn’t a tourist. Toushougu. That name rang a bell… but why?

~*~

He’d started avoiding the lab after the fifth day. It was too empty without Jemma’s tuneless humming, the tapping of her nails on the keyboard or the clicks and drips and splashes of her experiments. Fitz hadn’t realized the scent of her perfume had become part of the lab until he found himself missing it horribly. No one had mentioned when they found him cleaning up broken glassware from the tables and floor afterward, but he’d caught Ward and May both watching him warily more than once since.

After that he’d tried sticking close to Skye, asking ceaseless questions about what leads she had and how long it would take her to get more information. Coulson had to threaten to lock Fitz in the interrogation room for a day to get him to back off.

He wasn’t sleeping well, catching short naps wherever he happened to doze off and then waking to pester the rest of the team. Fitz hated being helpless and unfortunately none of his skills were useful in finding Jemma any faster. Skye had come up with leads and turned them over to May and Ward to review but nothing yet had panned out. When S.H.I.E.L.D. tried to give them another assignment in the meantime, Fitz threw a fit and Coulson made good on his threat. The engineer woke up on a pallet the interrogation room, groggy from a dose of dendrotoxin.

On day nine he’d shifted from pestering to taking care of Skye in Jemma’s absence, knowing the hacker was their best chance of finding her. He made coffee, brought her food, fetched tech from various places, even built a wi-fi signal booster - whatever she asked for that would help in the search.

To her credit, Skye’s resolve was bolstered every time she saw Fitz’s lost expression. He was losing weight he couldn’t afford to from that slender body, picking at his food. She’d found that if she ate more, she could badger him into taking more than a token nibble. A few extra pounds on her hips were worth it. Besides, once they found Jemma and she started training again, Ward would make her work them back off.

At 3am on the morning of the twelfth day, Skye’s exclamation echoed through the silence of the Bus and Fitz nearly fell on his face rushing to the hacker’s bunk. “Wha? Did y’ find somethin’?”

Skye spun the laptop around for him to look, but the only thing Fitz recognized was the map of Japan. “Wha’ am I lookin’ a’? Tha’s Japan, but wha’ abou’ th’ res’ of i’?” His brogue was thick with exhaustion but there was excitement too.

“It’s the Yakuza,” Skye said simply. “I know where she is; now we have to figure out how to get her back.” 

~*~

Jemma tensed, but didn’t turn around at the hiss of the door sliding open. The view through her microscope was hardly less alarming, but it, at least, presented a problem she had a chance of figuring out. Still, the near-silent footsteps drew her concentration, and the presence of Dr. Sakurai loomed deceptively benign at her back. Asako Sakurai, neé Yamaguchi, was niece to the current leader of the Yamaguchi-gumi and a former S.H.I.E.L.D. Sci-Ops agent, which was where Jemma had heard the name.

"How goes the research, sensei?" she asked.

Jemma waited until the cell beneath her microscope had mutated, swelling and thickening at the nucleus until the cell walls—still too delicate to support the strengthening interior—burst, as she’d anticipated. She stood, brushing back a lock of hair that had come loose from her braid.

"As one might expect for something as unstable as the super-soldier serum. I’m not certain how Dr. Banner managed to stabilize the cell walls enough to keep every cell in his body from rupturing when he attempted to recreate it."

“Otsukaresama-desu,” Dr. Sakurai said, smiling and nodding her head in the barest approximation of a bow. “Though we would not say no to something like the Hulk in our ranks, I think that is enough research for now, sensei. I would like you to take the afternoon off to relax. Come with me.”

Jemma reached for the petri dish, but Dr. Sakurai waved her away. “You have assistants for that,” she said. Jemma hesitated, never one to leave the cleaning up to someone else. She clenched her outstretched hand. It was no use denying Dr. Sakurai. She turned back and followed the woman from the door.

Dr. Sakurai—resplendent in a deep blue kimono with an elaborately-tied gold and pink obi—looked less to Jemma like a yakuza than a perfect porcelain doll. The woman’s skin was flawless. Yet, beneath all those layers of silk and clean perfection was a woman hard as folded steel, with the same sharp and dangerous edge. The short sword—wakazashi—she wore through her obi was probably quite deadly enough to preclude the need for a gun.

Jemma followed her through the pristine halls of the lab, out to the parking deck where a man in a dark suit opened the door of a black car. Jemma slid in after Dr. Sakurai and neglected to fasten her safety belt. At this point, she almost hoped for an accident.

None came. She was shepherded back into the luxurious compound, with its traditional Japanese tatami mats and elaborate wood carvings, its mounted CC-TV cameras, spiked walls, and multiple guards. Jemma had stayed at that house for two weeks, treated like nothing if not an honored guest. She had attendants. She was served elaborate meals by women who bowed and kept her tea refilled, asked after her preferences and escorted her to the enormous, steaming bath. She hadn’t needed to comb or style her own hair for days.

She’d felt a lot more sympathetic to those princesses locked in towers after a few days of this, for she knew the attendants were half there to make her comfortable, and half there to make her stay.

"Have you ever been to a hot spring?" Dr. Sakurai asked. "It is very good for health and relaxation. I have reserved a hot springs hotel for our use this afternoon and evening. I would like to bring you to Nikko Toushougu shrine. It is lovely this time of year, and I think you will appreciate the beauty."

Jemma clenched her jaw and nodded, following the beckoning attendants into her room, where a black and electric blue kimono hung on a stand. Something in her gut sank.

This was no ordinary relaxation trip. What it was, she had no idea.

~*~

The next few days were filled with meetings and planning for tactics and logistics for extracting their teammate from her captors. S.H.I.E.L.D. had chosen to give them additional manpower based on everything Skye had discovered once she’d managed to crack the extensive layers of encryption and other security the Yakuza were using to guard their secrets. Fitz hadn’t been made privy to those details, but he didn’t care. He had a special assignment all his own that was fully occupying his attention.

He was designing an even smaller model of the DWARF drones, with an extra special one meant for Jemma that had a microphone in addition to what Coulson had asked for, plus a tracker that she could swallow if necessary. If the Yakuza tried to move her to another location, he wanted to know immediately. The others were meant to wander around the lab and the rest of the house she was being held in to get as much additional information as they could before rescuing her.

Victoria Hand and her cohorts kept calling the mission a rescue attempt, but he wouldn’t accept any other end to all this than Jemma being returned to them safe and sound. If it wasn’t for Skye, who had reversed their roles and assigned herself as his lab assistant, Fitz would have totally lost himself in his project, finally having some sort of direction and means of helping his best friend.

Eventually Fitz was able to send Skye off to the other side of the airfield with the prototype drone to test the camera and audio. If he’d made a success of this project at any other time he’d have counted it one of his proudest accomplishments, but getting his Jemma back was a higher priority. Once Fitz was satisfied with the first drone, it was only a matter of time before the other twelve units were assembled, programmed and tested.

Two days before the scheduled mission and three nearly sleepless days after Fitz was given his task, he carried a wide, flat case upstairs to where Coulson, May and Ward were huddled around the holographic planning table. “Done,” he announced, setting the case down with an audible click on the glass surface. A few taps on the touchscreen brought up a list. “An’ if you ge’ me those parts while I ge’ a few hours’ sleep, I can build another twenty an’ ge’ them into tha’ house tonigh’.”

Ward was the first to break from stunned silence and pluck one of the tiny machines from its case, peering at it. “It looks like a bug,” he commented immediately. “Anyone who sees these will squash them.”

“Ach, no. These are modeled on stinkbugs. Is a common pes’ in Japan and they le’ ou’ an ‘orrible smell when they’re squished. I think they’ll be lef’ alone for th’ mos’ par’,” Fitz smiled proudly. “Camera, locator chip an’ transmitter combined wi’ a verra small body, can be remote controlled or lef’ t’ move around on is own. Th’ only thing they canna do is fly. If I had ‘nother week, I could probably do tha’ too.”

Surprisingly, it was May who broke the silence that followed. “It’s a damned good thing S.H.I.E.L.D. recruited you before someone else did.” 

~*~

The Kimono was not as uncomfortable as Jemma had feared, but it had been a task to sit in the car without crushing the elaborate knot at the small of her back. It was rather what wearing a loose corset might have felt like, she imagined, only the garment was tight from hip to ankle as well, and her white, split-toed socks and wooden sandals made it a bit treacherous to walk on the uneven, stone-paved ascent to the onsen.

They were shown to rooms by a full staff of neat, bowing staff, and Jemma found herself standing in her odd socks in the middle of a neat room with a large sliding door that led to a closet. Inside was a futon stacked with a white down comforter and a wool blanket, along with a thin blue and white yukata. The sliding glass door opposite led to a small balcony that overlooked the river and a few of the stone pools below.

The steam rising past her window from the hot spring pools smelled predictably sulfuric. A gust of frigid wind tore the curling tendrils to shreds as it blasted past, bringing with it the electric scent of a storm. Snow, if she were to guess by the sudden temperature drop. The late Autumn mountains of the Tochigi prefecture may not have been the coldest part of Japan, but they were cold enough to be getting on with.

A knock sounded on her door seconds before it slid aside, revealing two kneeling staff members, who rose with smiles but avoided her eyes.

“Shitsureshimasu,” one of the women said—an older one with steel gray hair pulled back in a bun. Dr. Sakurai entered after her.

"Kimono wo nugete," she said to the ladies, then glanced at Jemma. "They will help you into a yukata. Shall we relax in the hot spring before dinner?"

"I suppose I don’t have a choice, do I?" Jemma said, holding out her arms as the two ladies began pulling free the thick bow at her back.

"Please, sensei. You may think me harsh in my methods, but I greatly respect your work. I have been following you since the academy, and I want the same thing you do—a sovereign, safe earth. Please, let us be friends. Let me be your ally."

The pressure of the obi released, and Jemma’s lungs swelled automatically, her shoulders relaxing despite the thin binding still holding the heavy silk in place.

"I’m afraid that will be difficult," Jemma said. "In my experience, friendship requires a certain level of trust. I might find that easier to trust you if you hadn’t threatened everyone I care about to ensure my cooperation. Or betrayed S.H.I.E.L.D. into thinking you had died in a failed experiment."

Dr. Sakurai sighed, taking the yukata from the open closet and shaking it out, even as the two staff members pulled Jemma’s kimono from her shoulders. Standing in the sleeveless linen shirt and a pair of pink underwear, it was difficult to look stern, but she tried anyway. Failure came when one woman pulled the tank over her head and indicated Jemma should remove her pants as well.

Her bare skin tightened into gooseflesh as the two servants backed off, folding her things, and Dr. Sakurai stood before her, a small smile curving her mouth as she stared Jemma straight in the eyes, clearly aware of how uncomfortably vulnerable it felt to be standing there, naked, before the woman responsible for her abuction.

Dr. Sakurai walked around behind her, and Jemma shivered, tense and hyper-aware of every footstep. The scratchy cotton fabric wrapped around her shoulders even as Dr. Sakurai stepped forward, holding the yukata sleeves for Jemma to slide her arms into, and tying the thinner obi around her hips in a knot Jemma never could have replicated.

"It will snow soon," the woman’s alto voice said. "Come. If you have not seen the snow vanish into steam, I am sure you will not want to miss it."

She led the way down a damp stone staircase. There was no one behind Jemma, but she was certain even if she tried to run, she wouldn’t get far. Not in the mountains when it was about to snow, and she was wearing nothing but a thin cotton robe.

On her way down, however, she saw something that made her heart leap into her throat—a telephone, wedged behind a small desk where a number of towels lay waiting for use. Dr. Sakurai smiled at Jemma and gestured to one of the steaming pools, which had gathered in a rock basin. Over the crest of the rocks, she could see a river flowing past, capped and cold, and the forest beyond, the trees heavy with…

"Monkeys?" she said.

"Yes, of course," Dr. Sakurai said. "Nikko is famous for monkeys. You will see—they are even on the Toushougu shrine’s carvings. Do you know the three monkeys? The one who sees no evil, the one that speaks no evil, and the one who hears no evil?"

Jemma stared. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard of it. I’ve also heard the story is generally removed from context.”

Dr. Sakurai nodded. “That is not surprising.” With that, she pulled the knot in her obi and shrugged out of her thin yukata. Jemma started, but did not gasp as the image of a wild cherry-blossom tree appeared, tattooed in striking detail on Dr. Sakurai’s back. Somehow, she hadn’t expected the doctor to have yakuza tattoos, but there it was—spreading from the small of her back over her shoulders and down her arms, falling petals and a winding, red dragon.

She had to find a way to that phone.

~*~

Late that night a S.H.I.E.L.D. drone delivered Fitz' little stinkbugs to the house where Jemma was being held. The engineer set targets for most of them and let them work through the house, but his special little bug he was directing to Jemma himself. Through the wall, across a long hall, under a door and up the wall until the little drone was a small dark spot on the wall behind Jemma's pillow. The rest of the Bus was quiet as Fitz gave a heavy sigh of relief. It didn't look like they had been mistreating her.

He quietly keyed up the microphone, dialing the volume down to a soft whisper, "Jemma. Jemma, wake up," Fitz called to her.

Her sleeping mind incorporated the voice into a dream, twisting it into a scene where Fitz stood in front of her, his bare back fully inked in a tattoo that spanned from the small of his back to his elbows. The design centered around a sinuous dragon scaled with gears, swirling waves made up of wires, but the rest of it shifted, as if it were alive, burning in the same areas her own skin burned—down her spine, over her ribs. Everywhere, really, but mostly there.

Gradually, the voice pulled her from the gooey hold of pain-killer induced sleep, and she recognized the slightly-tinny quality of his voice, higher as the digitized version of it removed the vibration of his lower register. “Jemma, wake up.”

"Fitz?" she whispered, looking around for the source of the voice. Then she found it—a tiny, blinking light on a beetle no larger than her fingernail. "Fitz. You can’t…they can’t know you’ve found me. There’s a bomb on the plane. They know where my parents… Don’t do this. Please. I’m," she was fighting through the drowsiness of the opiate again. "I’m trying to protect you."

She swallowed, and as she shifted onto her elbows, gasped a little at the burning feeling that cut through the fading drug. She wasn’t wearing anything—even the cotton yukata had felt too painful over her skin after the evening at the ryoukan, for after an hour or so in the onsen and a lavish dinner with Dr. Sakurai and a number of other Yamaguchi bosses, she’d been asked to pledge herself to the group. “Gumi”, they called it. And, thinking of Fitz and Skye and her family and everyone she wanted to protect, she’d agreed.

An hour later, she’d sat on a pallet, naked, as an artist hand-tapped ink into her skin, drawing out the black outline of a tattoo in the traditional style, marking her from her thighs to the nape of her neck as one of theirs. It had been excruciating, but Dr. Sakurai had sat before her the whole time, mopping tears from her face and feeding her tiny cups of hot sake to dull the pain.

"Shhh. Keep your voice down. We don' wan' t' draw any attention," Fitz cautioned her. "There's a whole lo' of these li'l drones in the house righ' now, doin' recon for us. Based on wha' Skye foun' ou' abou' these people, S.H.I.E.L.D. wants them gone." His tone turned serious when he continued though, finally understanding why Simmons had left without kicking up much fuss.

Back on the Bus, Fitz muted the microphone to Jemma and tapped into Coulson's comm unit. Their leader never did seem to sleep, and Fitz was reassured when Coulson's calm "Go ahead" sounded out right away. "Sir, I've foun' Jemma wi' one o' th' drones. Can y' wake Ward an' come down to the lab? We ha' a problem."

"Done," Coulson responded and Fitz refocused on Jemma, "Coulson an' Ward are on their way. Y' can tell us wha' y' know an' we'll deal wi' it. Your parents too," he reassured her. Fitz' voice softened, watching her on the camera, "I... Is good t' see you, Jem. It hasna been the same wi' out you." 

"Fitz…" she whispered, her throat clotting. She bowed her head and breathed evenly a few times, collecting her thoughts. "I need a guarantee from SHIELD that my family will be safe, and I need that bomb disabled. If I can get both of those things, I’ll tell you where I’ll be tomorrow." She tugged the sheet closer around her, glad there was a pillow between her and the little bug, blocking her chest. "Does this thing have…a camera?"

"Yes, bu' I can turn i' off if y' want. Coulson an' Ward will be here in a moment," he mentioned, watching them clatter down the spiral stairs. He didn't really want to lose the first glimpse of her that he's had in nearly two weeks, but if that's what she wanted, he would. "Coulson, Jemma tells me these bloody bampots have left us a wee gift on board. Jem, have we go' any idea where?" Fitz tried his best to sound calm and professional - something he'd been working on since his mission with Ward several months ago - but wasn't sure he succeeded. He wanted Jemma back but he also didn't want to be blown up. "An' they've threatened her parents. Can we get them ou' o' London?"

Coulson and Ward glanced at each other and both huddled down in front of the camera on either side of Fitz to pepper Jemma with questions. "Do you know where the bomb is? Any details about it? What have they said about your parents? Are you relatively safe where you are? Are they planning on moving you any time soon?"

"I don’t know where it is," she admitted. "I was… I was writing that letter when they were installing it, and I had a gun to the back of my head. All I know was that it was small, and if I were to guess, it’s probably more of an electromagnetic pulse rather than actual explosives, so I would guess near the cockpit." She took a breath and drew the sheet closer, forcing herself to sit up, hoping that the sheet concealed enough, or that Fitz had turned the camera off.

"As for my parents, they managed to rattle off their last five addresses, their descriptions, and even my nephew’s kindercare nursery. They know everything." Her hands were shaking, and she drew her fingers through her hair, though the motion pulled at the bandages spilling down over her triceps. "And. I’m…I’m okay." It sounded like a lie, with her voice so thick and unsteady. "They’re taking me out of the house tomorrow, but not to the lab. It’s… I don’t know if I’ll be able to run or anything. I’m. Well. I’ll probably be stuffed into another kimono, and…" she couldn’t really tell them. "And I’m…currently on some sort of painkiller."

"I can find i'," Fitz said confidently when Coulson gave him a questioning glance, "EMPs are traceable if y' know wha' you're lookin' for, an' I do. I migh' still need Ward t' deactivate i' though."

"Fine. Jemma, we'll get your family taken care of. SHIELD has plenty of resources to ensure that they'll be kept safe and I'm currently authorized to requisition whatever I need to make sure this group is taken down within the next 48 hours," Coulson said firmly. "Fitz' little drone has a tracking chip attached to it. I want you to swallow that chip, Simmons. We don't want to lose you while we're dealing with everything else."

Ward interrupted after that, "Keep the drone with you. We'll keep you posted as much as we can. If we can make this happen fast enough, we'll get you back tomorrow when they bring you out of the house. The day after at the latest, no matter what else happens. Okay? We're not leaving you there."

She laughed a little. “It will be a bit hard to keep the drone with me,” she said. “There is literally nowhere I can hide it they won’t find it. I literally have to be dressed in the morning, and old Japanese ladies do not take ‘I am a modest British girl with body image concerns’ as no.”

She picked up the drone and examined it, looking for the microchip. “I’ve got the chip,” she said, pulling it free of the compartment as the beetle opened its wings. “I can tell you where I’ll be tomorrow, though. See no evil. Speak no evil. Hear no evil. Fitz, I’m sure you know where that is.”

Shuddering a little, she set the bug down on her pillow. “I’ll warn you, though. I will not be able to move very fast. You see, I’ve been inducted into their group. I’m the yakuza equivalent of an asset, and they’ve made certain people will know it.”

"You le' us worry abou' tha', Jem. There's goin' t' be a lo' goin' on," Fitz murmured quietly over the speaker and nodded at Coulson's raised eyebrow at Jemma's obscure reference to her location. "I know where y' are. I'll le' Coulson know after we're off comms. If y' canna keep the bug wi' you, leave i' in your room. I can use i' for other things."

Ward was the one to pick up on what she was also trying to tell them about being inducted. "They gave you painkillers so they could mark you? The full set?" the tall agent growled into the mic and Fitz blanched. He’d done the research but hadn't thought about the Yakuza taking that step with a Western scientist.

"Yes, on the dorsal side only, though, and a bit over the shoulders," she said. "I haven’t even seen it. I was too drunk by the time they’d finished with the basic outlines. They told me the complete thing would take a few sessions, so I’ve no idea how it looks right now, but at least some of it is there. Nice and permanent."

She sighed, then downed the tracker with water from a small kettle left near her. She took another painkiller as well. “That’s the end of backless gowns for me.” She tried to make it sound light.

"We're SHIELD. We have ways of removing identifying marks from our agents," Coulson reminder her. "Simmons, get some sleep if you can. We have a lot of work to do over here if we're going to get you out tomorrow."

"Sir... can I talk t' Jemma for a few more minutes?" Fitz questioned, one sandy eyebrow twitched up.

The only reason Coulson agreed was that this was the first time Fitz had seemed even close to himself since Jemma's disappearance. "Five minutes. She needs her sleep and you need to help us find whatever device they left on our bird."

"Yes sir. I can start setting up the trace for an EMP while I talk to her." The look that he gave Coulson was at once far too adult and yet childishly grateful. Coulson excused himself and motioned Ward to follow him out of the lab to give the two some privacy.

She smiled a bit to herself, knowing that what Coulson meant definitely applied to normal tattoos, but she doubted it would apply to these—the ink was fixed in through too many layers of skin. The scars caused by laser removal or grafting for such an extensive area of skin would end up more heinous than any ink. Besides, she wasn’t a field agent. It wouldn’t matter for her to have identifying marks. The people who wanted to identify and abduct her were clearly capable of doing it regardless.

"What is it, Fitz?" she asked. "Are you all right?"

He gave her a smile, forgetting that she couldn’t see it. "Are either o' us ever okay when we're no' together?" Fitz asked quietly. It was the first time either of them had ever openly admitted that they fell apart when separated. He leaned his elbows on the edge of the desk and dropped his head, fingers tunneling into his hair. "Damni', Jem," he swore, but there was no anger in it, only frustration. Fitz looked up again and his eyes were haunted. "Jus'... be careful, yeah? We're too close t' gettin' y' back."

"Fitz," she whispered, not sure what to say to the confessions and worries so clear between his actual words. "Fitz. You know… you know what I wanted to say, right? In the letter?" She said, still afraid of the words locked in her chest. "I’ll be careful. Careful as I can. I’m not. I’m not okay without you."

"I know," he said softly. "Seems we both have some things t' say t' each other. When you're back. I'm no' havin' this conversation wi' you by drone." Fitz glanced down at the clock and sighed. "I need t' go help Ward an' Coulson find tha' thing. Ge' some res' if y' can." The last thing he wanted was to let her go, but there were still things to do to make sure this ended as well as it possibly could, with the fewest casualties on their side. 

Jemma nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her, if he’d actually turned the camera off. “All right,” she whispered. “Make sure you find it. Be careful.” She bit down against the words she wanted to close the call on, though they pushed at the backs of her teeth, spurred on by the desperation of the past weeks, and by the twining fingers of morphine slowly dragging her back toward the futon.

~*~

When she was shaken awake the next morning by one of the women who normally attended her, she fought confusedly at the hand on her wrist. Tangled in her duvet, the cotton pads strained, tape popping at their corners. Her back burned, her buttocks and thighs burned, and she cried out until another hand grabbed her opposite wrist and forced her back down to the futon.

A cooling mist sprayed across her back, even as the bandages were pulled away. She calmed, grappling for memory. A second coating of the cooling spray floated down over her naked back, and she felt it sink in, numbing everything. An hour later, she was fed and bundled back in the blue kimono with its golden ginko leaves and black network of branches. A long while was spent on her obi, tying it just so, not even loosened for the pain in her back.

One of the old women patted her clenched hand. “Gaman shite, ne?" she said, and though Jemma didn’t know the words, she understood the conciliatory tone and nodded. They pinned up her hair, weighing it down with a heavy golden ornament, and added earrings of golden ginko leaves and a few touches of makeup.

By nine o’clock, she stood, swaying with the effect of painkillers, on a cobbled street in front of an enormous compound-like shrine, its buildings resplendent with elaborate painted carvings.

"Toushougu-jinja," Dr. Sakurai said, steadying Jemma with a hand under her elbow and leading her under the torii and up the long set of stone stairs. "It is one of our national treasures. And look, there," she pointed at an odd carving that looked like a bear with tusks and a grotesquely long, sinuous nose. "What do you think that is?"

Jemma raised her eyebrows. “A bear?”

Dr. Sakurai laughed. “It’s an elephant, carved by artists who had never seen one before. They worked from descriptions.”

"That sounds familiar," Jemma said wryly. A soft rain had started up, and no sooner did the first chilly drop hit her forehead than two suit-clad men were beside them, holding umbrellas.

~*~

Fitz had worried that someone, somewhere, higher up in SHIELD would decree that Jemma wasn't worth this extra trouble of fetching her family into a safe house and taking the extra steps to plan a rescue instead of blowing the Yakuza compound out of existence. Thankfully that hadn't happened, because he wasn't quite sure what he'd have done. Coulson would probably have sedated him and locked him in the cell again to keep him from going after Jemma on his own.

He scrubbed his hands over his face and sat heavily on one of the crates in the cargo bay, exhausted from his long night. At least finding the device had been the difficult part. Between Fitz, Ward and the explosives specialist SHIELD had sent down, disarming and removing the bloody thing hadn't taken more than an hour. Fitz was rather proud of that, but until this was all over none of it mattered.

Skye watched Fitz from the top of the stairs for several minutes before padding down to sit next to him. "She'll be okay, Fitz. May and Ward will get her out. You know they will," she said, trying to reassure him. "AC doesn't know how to fail at anything."

He turned and the look he gave her didn't need words. Until Jemma stepped back onto the Bus, he was going to be a wreck and nothing Skye could say was going to be of any help.

The hacker pressed her lips together, choosing to be quiet for once. If she'd learned anything from Fitz these past two weeks, it was that he was more stubborn than anyone gave him credit for and he didn't give a shit about SHIELD. Jemma was his first and last priority.

Clicking footsteps from impeccably shined dress shoes came up the ramp, Coulson giving Lola his accustomed pat as he rounded her bumper. "Fitz, Skye. The mission goes live in an hour. I want you both in your bunks, off comms. No hacking into the feeds. No using the drones to spy on how things are going. Can I trust you to do that, or do I need to put bracelets on both of you?"

They both burst into protest, but Coulson gave them the icy look that he only used when he absolutely meant what he was saying. Fitz stared at Coulson, bristling, and finally nodded. "Can I be in th' lab? If you're blocking me from followin' wha's goin' on, I need t' be doin' _somethin'_. I canna jus' si' in my bunk."

"Fine. Skye, you can stay in the lab with him if you want," he conceded.

"Okay," she said quietly.

Forty five minutes later they both went quiet as Ward and May tossed gear into the SUV and left to rendezvous with the other SHIELD teams.

~*~

She noticed the signal a little late through the wavery pane of glass the painkillers seemed to have placed between her and the rest of the world. She let her legs give out and felt the air hiss above her as a bullet streaked an inch from the back of her neck and struck the guard who was even then bending to grab her. He grunted, falling back and drawing a gun of his own, one shoulder hanging low.

“Yare!" Dr. Sakurai yelled, grabbing Jemma’s shoulders and dragging her to her feet. "Come, I will protect you."

Jemma started to protest, but couldn’t get the words out before Dr. Sakurai, drawing a gun from the back of her obi, hauled her bodily into one of the buildings painted gold and red. “I can’t believe another gumi attacked us at a sacred place,” she growled. Stay back, Jemma.”

Her throat tightened as the woman, one arm stretched back to hold Jemma behind her against the wall, moved to shield her with her body. It was the protection of an asset, she knew. Part of Dr. Sakurai’s duty as a leader of one of the Yamaguchi gangs. But a part of her saw it differently—remembered the way she’d asked Jemma to call her Asako, the way she’d demanded rest and the best food, the way she’d dropped her yukata at the hot spring, revealing tattoos that must have been very personal.

She’d smiled, nudging Jemma’s foot, teasing her about her modesty and how quickly the hot springs made her flushed and dizzy. She’d mopped her tears and pillowed Jemma’s head on her knees, stroking her hair back from her face as the tattoo artist moved his work to the backs of her thighs. She’d cleaned her ears with a long cotton swab—a strange custom to Westerners, but one she knew to be an intimate gesture in many Asian cultures.

All that, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe Dr. Sakurai wasn’t partly shielding her as a friend. Then, in an instant, May was there, dressed in a red kimono with a quilted robe hanging over it to conceal, no doubt, a number of weapons. Dr. Sakurai aimed her gun, said something in Japanese, but May was too fast.

In seconds, Dr. Sakurai was unconscious at Jemma’s feet. May grabbed her hand, “Come on!”

Jemma looked back at Dr. Sakurai’s unconscious form, the gun lying useless on the ground. She almost stopped, torn, but another gunshot had May dragging her along again. Then the helicopter was over them, chopping the air with great, loud whuffs, and Ward grabbed her around the waist, ignoring her cry of pain as a winch reeled the rope in. There was no gentle way to deposit her in the chopper, but the fact that the arms waiting to take her from Ward belonged to Agent Coulson made it a little easier.

He grabbed her, pinning her tight against him with one arm as Ward swung in, May spider-climbing in after him followed by two others. They grabbed the end of the knotted rope and the chopper was above the blood-red trees of Nikko, reorienting south. The door of the chopper slid shut, and someone placed sound-dampening headphones on her, but it didn’t drown out the scream welling up inside her, which she let out against her superior officer’s chest. She doubted anyone else heard it.

~*~

Fitz paced the length of the lab. Again. It must have been the 500th time that he'd circled the small room, if not more. The senior agents had been back for hours, but Jemma was still with the SHIELD medical team. He didn't understand why, she'd been just fine last night other than the tattoo she'd mentioned to him and Ward. Coulson had said she was fine. That didn't make him feel any better. It had been thirteen days - going on fourteen now, as the day crawled into the evening hours. Two weeks without her and even with the brief conversation last night he was ready to climb the walls.

It wasn't until Ward came down to set up his punching bag that Fitz finally got an answer. "She was captured and held by an enemy organization. That requires full debriefing, a medical exam and a thorough psych eval, Monkey. You might still not get to see her for awhile, if something comes up," Ward pointed out. "I know you want her back on the Bus, but SHIELD has procedures that have to be followed, even if Agent Coulson disregards a lot of them while we're out."

"Y' have go' t' be kiddin' me. After all tha? I' migh' be _days_ before she's back if they do a full psych eval!" There were things in Simmons' past that had been part of why she hadn't passed the field assessment. If they really went digging into the dark spots in her past... They might not let her back at all if they knew just how badly depressed and anxious she could get when triggered. Fitz shut himself back in the lab, pulling on a pair of headphones and blasting music into them as though it could drown out his worries.

~*~

She felt calmer when the debriefer informed her that Dr. Sakurai had been captured, alive and uninjured, and was being held for questioning. Her feelings for the woman were mixed, and though she shared them with the Psychologist responsible for her evaluation, the slight feeling she had betrayed someone who had treated her kindly in a frightening situation—despite being the one to have manufactured it—lingered. Luckily, she knew it was normal, and when she assured the psychologist that she had absolutely no feelings of loyalty whatsoever to the Yamaguchi-gumi, and felt, more than anything, exhausted, she was released to further debriefing with orders to watch her over the next few weeks to signs of PTSD or significantly increased anxiety.

By the time she was finally released to the bus, her back and arms were almost fully healed, thanks to the wonders of SciOps biomedical technology. The nurse practitioner who had helped her apply salve the last two mornings had even commented on how beautiful they were, despite the trauma.

"I’m certain I’m the only person in SciOps with anything near this much ink," she’d laughed back. "It’s too deep to remove properly, isn’t it." It was a statement, not a question, but the nurse pressed her lips a little sadly and nodded.

"At least it’s not a butterfly on your bum or something," she said. "Bad portrait of an ex boyfriend."

Nothing had quite penetrated the drone of continued anxiety until she saw the Bus, waiting for her on the runway of a small airfield in Okinawa. She was glad to be rid of the kimono, which had been sent ahead with the other things of hers that had been recovered. Now she wore a pair of soft black leggings, ankle-high black boots, and a man’s striped buttonup—none of her own clothing, but what seemed to be a motley assemblage of Coulson, May, and Skye’s things. There was also a heavy gold watch. The least necessary of the articles of clothing, but probably the one that made her feel the most grounded. She liked the weight of it on her wrist, pressing down against her hand as she walked toward the Bus, wishing she could run.

Agent Coulson once again proved that sometimes he had an almost preternatural level of empathy for his team and shooed everyone except Fitz out of the Bus when he got the notice that Jemma was being released. His two scientists needed time to talk without the rest of the team interrupting - or even being distractions just by their presence. Certainly Fitz was more restrained about talking when he had an audience than he did if it was just him and Jemma.

And so, when Jemma keyed in her passcode and came up the ramp, the SUV was missing and Fitz was the only person aboard. The engineer had stationed himself on the bottom steps of the spiral up to the second level, looking forlorn and more than a bit run down. He still wasn't sleeping and only picking at meals despite Skye's continued harassment, thinner in his skin than he'd been seventeen days ago, when he'd found her note.

There was a long silence as his blue eyes swept over Jemma, silently cataloguing for problems. Somewhat satisfied with his inspection he got to his feet, standing nervously with his hands shoved in his pockets. "Welcome home, Jemma," he finally said, his voice suspiciously thick. 

She continued walking at the same pace toward him, as if he were an inexorable well of gravity drawing her in. Her scan of him was quick: he’d lost at least 5kg, all that nice dense muscle he’d added dropped in two weeks. His eye sockets and cheeks were hollow. Exhaustion dragging at every feature. Face rough and shadowed with a few days’ uneven beard. All in all, she thought she’d fared rather better.

He watched her, those blue eyes fragile as glass.

She didn’t hurl herself into his arms as she’d dreamed of doing. That movie in her head didn’t seem to fit the reality of him standing before her, just as fragile for the separation as she. So Jemma kept walking, closing the intervening space, and kept walking until she was against him and his scent was in her nose, his rough jaw in her hands. She hadn’t planned it, but his mouth called hers like a magnet. She kissed him, fingers sliding back into his hair, stroking forward to his jaw again, hands restlessly touching and confirming his reality as she pressed into him, wishing she could just phase herself in, melt them into one person

Fitz felt something break inside him, a tension he didn't realizing he was still holding onto, and found himself with one hand locked behind her back, the other tangled in her long hair. This wasn't even close to how he'd ever imagined their first kiss, but it was them and Jemma was there and was okay and Fitz found he didn't really care.

When he did finally break away it was to walk kisses up her nose and forehead before leaning his forehead against hers. There was a long moment where he didn't know what to say and he eventually let out a soft, slightly hoarse chuckle. "I'm so glad y' are back an' okay," he murmured. For all they'd been dancing around whatever it was between them for months - years - it felt unbearably intimate, staring into her eyes from so close and yet it wasn't uncomfortable at all. Everything Fitz is, was and will be is inextricably tied up with the woman in front of him, and for once Fitz is totally at peace with that.

For weeks, she’d felt like a tree pulled roughly from the soil, kept alive by manufactured sunlight and intravenous nutrients. Suspended, but failing to thrive. Now, holding onto Fitz, having his arms around her and his blue eyes right there, his voice rough and familiar in her ears, she felt her roots return to soil, sinking deep into the cavity she knew she’d left behind.

They could be without each other, but it would never be quite right. He sustained her. She held him together. Roots and earth. She rubbed her hands down his chest when he spoke, smiling as his eyes communicated all the other things he couldn’t find the words for, that she didn’t need words to understand. That’s a look she could never get tired of.

One hand stayed on his chest as she reached up, stroking his too-lean, unshaven face with the other. She hadn’t really thought, somehow, he’d feel this rough under her hands. Part of him had remained in her mind the precocious, gunshy adolescent he’d been when she met him. Forehead still pressed to his, she stroked around the angle of his jaw, then down his neck, finally resting over his heart. “You look like you could do with a few good meals yourself,” she whispered, already flipping through the index in her mind that told her which of his favorite foods had the most nutritional value.

His skin prickled, goosebumps pebbling his skin in the wake of Jemma's fingers. Somehow she was more beautiful now than he remembered her being before she left and all he could do was drink her in. Fitz's fair skin flushed pink when he realized she'd noticed the changes in him and he dropped his gaze, more than a little bashful, "Yea', well. I migh' ha' been more than a bi' distracted by other things the pas' couple o' weeks an' forgo' t' ea' once or twice." Shifting to catch her hands in his, Fitz straightened and let out a deep breath of simple contentment. She was back. She was okay. All was right in his world again, the Earth could stop tipping at the wrong angle on its axis and spinning at the wrong speed.

"C'mon," he said, giving her hands a tug, "Everyone's gone, we ha' th' place t' ourselves. Y' can make a big mess in th' kitchen if y' want."

She grinned and let him drag her up the stairs, but by the time they got to the top, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She grabbed him, pulled him back against her and slid her arms around him, squeezing and burying her face between his shoulderblades. He felt good in her arms. He filled up just the right amount of space.

Suddenly, she remembered her dream. She’d thought of it a few times since she’d woken that night with his voice in her ear, the sight of the geared and wired dragon yakuza tattoo burned into her mind. She exhaled into the cotton of his shirt, ran her hands up his chest and held him back against her for another few heartbeats. “The tattoo is really…strange. Do you want to see it after we’ve eaten? Or…”

Maybe it wasn’t something he wanted to see at all.

His hands followed hers until he tangled them all together over his chest, Fitz letting out a soft, contented sigh when he felt her pressed up against him like that. The feeling was short lived when she abruptly reminded him the Yakuza had made a very concerted effort to literally make her theirs. "I... w- wha?" he stammered out, confused and more than a little disconcerted. Was she offering to strip down in front of him? He'd done some research in those unexpected extra days he'd had to wait for her to come back and had a good idea of just how extensive those tattoos could be. "I mean, I'd like t' see i'... sometime. But maybe no' today. Y' did jus' ge' back," he finally muttered.

"Right, of course," she said, feeling a little silly. She fought the urge to pull away out of embarrassment, but held on instead. "Sorry. It’s… it’s hard to accept that it’s there. Permanently. It’s just so unlike me in every way. I’m having trouble accepting it’s real. I can ask Skye, though." She buried her face in his back again, squeezing him hard as she can, which is probably harder than anyone but Fitz would have expected. He was the only one who knew about her rowing, after all.

After a moment, she pushed against him hard enough to force him into a walk. She walked with him in an awkward, deliberate gait, unwilling to let him go as they made their way to the kitchen.

"Wha' does Skye have t' do wi' anythin'?" Fitz asked as she marched him down the hall, fingers still clasped together. "Is there some particular reason y' wan' someone t' look at th' tattoos?" he questioned her quietly. When they reached the kitchen he pulled their joined hands up to kiss the palms of hers before letting go and turning to face her. "Jem, is no' tha' I dinna wan' t' see, is that y' jus' came back an' we're jus’ startin' to figure ou'... wha'ever this is betwee' us. Can i' wai a day or two for things t' settle?"

"Oh!" she said, and she puts her hands to her face, which she’s certain is now scarlet. It feels hot as a tea kettle. "No, I didn’t mean—sorry. I didn’t mean the whole thing. Of course, that would be…well, not something to do just yet, would it?" She almost laughed, but the embarrassment of realizing what she’d inadvertently suggested turns it into a nervous wheeze.

"Just part of it. It’s not…oh, bloody hell." She groaned and tilted her head down to rub at her forehead. "It didn’t take long for me to muck that up, did it?" She cringed, her ears stinging with the force of her blush.

"Really, I just mean part of it. I know everyone is going to be curious, and I don’t want to keep answering questions about it. So I just thought—yeah. I thought if at least one other person saw at least part of it, I wouldn’t have to talk about it quite as much? If that even makes sense. And maybe, you know, have someone tell me it doesn’t make me look…" She didn’t know what she was afraid she would look like. Unattractive? Unprofessional? Deviant? Much as she hated to admit it, the first one bothered her the most. She wore enough collared shirts and cardigans that she wasn’t really afraid of it looking unprofessional, or being deemed deviant.

Maybe he was right. It was probably too early to worry about what his reaction to the tattoo would be.

"I’m going to put my face in the freezer," she said, and spun around to do just that.

"_Jemma_," he muttered, reaching to catch her wrist and pull her back. "The only person who is goin' t' be nosy abou' it is Skye. If y' dinna wan' t' tell her and don' wan' t' be rude, tha's okay. I'm good a' bein' rude. Is no' her business, is yours. Well... maybe sor' o' mine too, now?" he added with a faint blush and a quiet smile. This was actually easier than he'd expected... Of course, Jemma knew him so well by now that when he thought about it, it didn't surprise him that she'd simply stepped over the divide between friends and more as if it had never been there.

Fitz lived by rules. Not necessarily SHIELD's rules, because those were often foolish and arbitrary and made to be broken, but rules of nature and physics, chemistry and Jemma. His self-imposed rule of Jemma had always been 'hands off' because if he'd let himself he'd have grabbed on and not let go. It had been there, a necessary bondage, for so long that even when he'd desperately needed to touch her, he couldn't. Like after the Chitauri virus incident, when Fitz had busied his hands with his pillow to keep from reaching for her. Somehow, Jemma had known. Maybe she'd always known.

Now the rule was unnecessary, and he should probably still try to exercise _some_ restraint, but Fitz had just spent almost three weeks without her. He used his hold on Jemma's wrist to reel her in, leaning back against the kitchen counter to hug her tightly. "Is no' like we've never had awkward moments," he reminded her. "We didna judge ea' other for them before, so no need t' star' tha' nonsense now."

"You’re right," she said, relenting immediately when he drew her against him. “Sometimes I hate it when you’re right, but this time…” She pressed her nose into his shirt, circled his ribs with both arms, and pulled herself tighter to him. She sighed, letting the feeling of him against her, around her, fill her senses and push away the thoughts of embarrassment. It was so strange to finally get to do this, to hold him without being worried about what he’d do. Knowing he would be just as eager to have her in his arms.

She let him take her weight as he leaned back into the counter, and her hands moved down his sides, stopping at his waist before following the curve of rib and lateral muscle back around to his shoulder blades. It might be too much, she wasn’t certain. Didn’t really care. Her hands wanted to explore the geography of him—confirm the map her eyes had drawn with more of her senses. They refused to stay still, moving down the furrow of his spine until the counter stopped her.

“I don’t remember what I was doing,” she joked. “Something about the freezer.”

He blushed scarlet at the way she was stroking her hands over him and carefully extricated himself from the hug before he got ideas that he should _not_ be having right now. Fitz caught hold of Jemma's hands in the process though, not ready to completely let go although he was relieved she'd forgotten her embarrassment.

"I think y' were plannin' to freeze the blush off your face. Or get somethin' out to cook. I wasna eatin' properly, but i' didna help tha' none o' the res' of them know how t' cook worth a damn," he pointed out, sounding faintly annoyed. Not at her, but at the team's general culinary ineptitude. "Well, t' be fair, Coulson's no' bad, but he wasna here much."

Fitz' stomach let out a loud burble and he gave her the boyish, charming grin that only ever showed up for her, "So, wha's for dinner? I'll help, wha'ever you pick."

"Ah, yes. I was trying to get you back to welterweight," she teased, pulling out of his hands a little reluctantly and heading to the fridge.

She proceeded to tear apart the kitchenette, taking stock of what they had on hand and what she could make with it. By the time she was finished, she thoroughly suspected Coulson had known that part of her reaction to returning would be to feed Fitz, fix what she could of someone else as her own wounds healed, and had equipped the bus accordingly.

"Well, I could make a lot of things, actually. Spaghetti bolognese, meat loaf, stewed beef—though that would take a while—pot pie, pasta with clams, and number of vegetables. Someone bought swiss chard. Coulson? Probably. Oh, there’s goat cheese! I could probably do a tart—I know we’ve got the flour. Do we have onions? Good. Yes. I could do that. Or French onion soup. I don’t know if we have the proper bowls to really make that, though…"

"Mea' loaf," Fitz said promptly. "Y' can make th' swiss chard an' mashed potatoes wi' tha' new gravy you were fiddlin' with awhile ago." His stomach let out an even louder burble of approval at this idea. He was used to being the guinea pig for Jemma's cooking, but since chemistry and cooking were one and the same, she rarely gave him anything that wasn't at least tolerable. He had favorites though, and meat loaf was one of them.

Without waiting for approval of the menu, he circled the small area to collect the bag of potatoes, a large bowl and a knife. Fitz set these on the small island that separated the kitchenette from the lounge, leaving the bulk of the limited counter space for her to do the real work. He caught himself grinning at Jemma and tried to fight it down.

The rhythm of working with him came back so quickly that she almost didn’t notice it. She minced onions, garlic, celery, and carrots and set them to cooking down into a soffrito on the stove. He swept the vegetable ends into a freezer bag for her to make stock with, chucking bits that couldn’t be used. She measured out equal portions of beef and pork, measuring worcestershire in her palm, he peeled and diced potatoes, somehow aware of her enough not to get in her way.

It was a moment of pause, when she lifted her hands from mixing in bread crumbs and attempted to shake back a lock of hair that the steam from the pot of now-boiling potatoes had stuck to her forehead. He was working silently, prepping the things he knew she’d need, cleaning up the kitchen the same way he did the lab. Everything wiped down and neat, her covered to the wrists in something that was probably quite a bit too messy for his liking.

She could have used her forearm to swipe the hair back. She probably should have tied it up, because it was curling in the humidity of the stove. But she hadn’t tied it back. And she had a better idea anyway.

"Fitz, I need assistance," she teased. "My hair has gone native."

Fitz had a longstanding habit of cleaning things up as he worked. There was no sense keeping things out once you were done with them and in his line of work, having too much in a workspace just got to be a pain after awhile. Cooking went along the same theory, and since Jemma was doing the bulk of the work, the least he could do was make himself useful. He was knelt down on the floor, chasing a bit of potato peel he'd dropped, when Jemma spoke.

"Native?" Fitz eyed her, "Tha's a bi' rude, no? Your hair is nowhere near unmanageable." Still, he got to his feet and came over, laughing when he saw her predicament. "Y' should know better than t' cook wi' your hair down. Hol' on." The engineer emptied his pockets onto one of the clean counters and found one of Jemma's hair ties. It wasn't entirely surprising - he used them as makeshift parts for his creations more often than Fitz would admit.

He came up behind Jemma and gathered her mass of hair into a simple ponytail, then brushed the shorter strands around her face into place, tucking them behind her ears. With that accomplished and her monitoring the things in progress, Fitz hesitated a moment before he slipped his arms around Jemma's waist, bending a little to set his chin on her shoulder.

She couldn’t decide if the smile that pushed up the corners of her mouth was more satisfied or content, but either way, there was a definite hint of smugness to it, as if she’d gotten away with something not entirely above the law in order to have him there, holding onto her like that. She leaned back into him a little, tilting her head against his.

For a while she didn’t feel inclined to move, just letting him counter the weight of her body with his, basking in the fact that he was there, starting to meet her physically the same way he’d always done mentally. The barriers between them were starting to dissolve, like a sugar cube melting away. She stayed like that, covering his arms around her with one of her own until she needed it again to cook.

"Do you know when everyone is coming back?" she asked, voice quiet, sussing out how much time they had to be together without worrying what anyone else might make of the new facets their relationship was suddenly showing.

Fitz lifted his hand so he could see his watch. "A few hours, I think. Coulson an' Ward decided t' pu' Skye through an entire mission - plannin' an' logistics an' all. She's up agains' May. I dinna think i' will end well," he said with some humor. He'd have to remember to thank Coulson again for his forethought in letting him and Jemma have some peace and quiet before the rest of the team started making claims on Jemma's time.

Curious how she'd react, Fitz nuzzled against her neck, brushing the little flyaways at her neck away with his nose before kissing the skin there.

Goosebumps erupted down her arms and she froze, the sharp inhale and clench of her hand over Fitz’s arm all she was quite able to manage by way of reaction for a moment, because her body was busy dealing with the sudden flood of chemicals responding to that. It took a few seconds to relax again, but all her nerves seemed to be standing at attention, waiting for what he’d do with her reaction. Even his breath fluttering the hairs on her neck was immediately distracting.

A mischievous grin split his face and Fitz' arms snugged a little tighter around her. He'd worried that they had been friends so long it might be too awkward to be anything else, but given his reaction to _her_ reaction, that wouldn't be an issue at all. Who would have thought that seemingly innocent Jemma would be so affected by something that simple? "I'll have t' remember this for later," he murmured, lips brushing her skin and warm breath cast over her ear. Fitz knew he was just being a tease now, but he couldn't quite help himself.

"I hate you," she teased, breathless and smiling despite her words. "Stop it if you don’t want me to burn your food." She pressed back into him, enjoying his reciprocal response. The new dynamic was strangely comfortable. If she had only just come into her life, she would have thought they’d been together for longer.

Fitz' hands slipped to her waist, steadying her until she was holding herself up instead of leaning back against him. "We wouldna wan' tha'. No' since I've wasted away in th' pas' couple weeks," he said, trying to make light of the real reason she was cooking like this. "Maybe I should ask Ward abou' joinin' his trainin' sessions wi' Skye. Migh' be nice t' no' be so scrawny."

"Fitz," she said, a little warning in her voice. She pushed away from the stove and turned around in his arms, winding her arms around him. "I don’t care," she said, lifting onto her toes to bump her nose against his. "If you want to, go ahead. But I like you fine the way you are."

"Is no' because o' tha'," Fitz said, shaking his head. The easy smile slipped away from his face at the censure in her voice and he looked down, the slight rocking shift of weight from foot to foot giving away his nerves. So much for the easy banter he'd been trying for. "I've los' a stone or so in th' pas' three weeks, bu' it also seems like our missions keep goin' all t' hell. I migh' no' ever pass a fiel' assessmen', bu' I can be less o' a liability."

Fitz set his hands on her shoulders and brushed a kiss against her forehead before gently turning her back toward the stove. "Y' should keep an eye on tha'," he suggested quietly before retreating to the other side of the island that separated the kitchen from the lounge.

She turned the stove down to a simmer. “Fitz. Hey,” she said, following him around the island and reaching out to him. “Are…do you think I’m a liability?” she asked. “Because my field assessment was worse than yours, and I’m the one that apparently has ‘easy target’ stamped across her forehead.” She twisted her fingers in his shirt. “Fitz. Please. I agree that both of us should probably work a little harder to get close to field certified, but that wasn’t why S.H.I.E.L.D. hired you. They hired you because you’re brilliant. Because you’re fast-thinking and you don’t freeze up and you’re brave—whatever anyone tells you, I know you are, because it’s much harder to do something you’re in no way trained for than it is to do it for the thousandth time.”

She pulled his arms around her waist and moved her hands up, framing his face and forcing him to look at her. “You’ve always compared yourself to people with different skillsets, like Ward. You’re not less of a man or less of a person because you can’t do what he does, or because you haven’t been trained to do it. You’re an exceptional person the way you are. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t love you.”

"No, is no'..." Fitz felt worse realizing he'd inadvertently made her feel insecure as well. "Maybe neither o' us is one, I jus' feel like I could be doin' more." He sighed when she stepped in close again and hugged her against him, his eyes slipping closed at the eager, earnest expression on her face. "You've always though' better o' me than I think o' myself, Jem," he muttered, then his eyes blinked back open, blue eyes wide in shock and wary pleasure, "Y' love me?" He'd been hoping for three weeks that was what she'd wanted to say, and her behavior since stepping back onto the Bus had all been saying things were changing but he hadn't really expected Jemma to just say it, not so soon.

She smiled a little, brushing her thumbs back across his ears. “I take back the part where I said you were brilliant,” she said. “You’re an idiot.”

She pulled him down, kissing him like she had in the cargo hold, with her whole body pushing into him and her whole mind focused only on impressing into him the feeling of her mouth and her body and all the feelings they contained. She broke away only briefly, her lips not even fully removed from his.

"Of course I love you," she murmured, and kissed him again. "I love you," she said, and slid her arms around his neck, and kissed his chin, then his jaw. "I love you." She kissed his hollow cheek, let her breath ghost over his ear as she said it again. "I love you." She kissed beneath his ear, in the soft place just behind the turn of his jaw.

There was no way in hell he deserved her. That was a big part of the reason he'd never admitted how he felt about her before. Fitz flushed when she called him an idiot, but by the time she'd said I love you for the fourth time, his blush was for a totally different reason. He caught Jemma's face in his hands and kissed her with everything he was worth until they both were completely breathless and pretty much holding each other up. When he finally had to break away enough to take in a real breath, he grinned at her, purely happy for the first time in months - maybe years. "I love you, too," he said between unsteady breaths.

She stared at him, dumb with the full force of the kiss and his unimpeded smile and the fact that he could say it back to her. Somehow, she’d thought it would be a while before he was ready. Finally, she laughed. And then she threw her arms around him and picked herself up off the ground hugging him. “Good,” she said. “Good. Because I don’t make meatloaf for just anyone.”

She was having to ignore the rest of her body, which was telling her that the meatloaf could go to hell and she needed to get Fitz back to one of their rooms now if it meant knocking him out with a fire extinguisher again and dragging him by the tie. But she didn’t. She knew him. Knew his hesitations. Knew his scars and why they were there. She tipped herself up onto her toes again and kissed his chin.

The same thought had crossed Fitz' mind more than once, but he discarded the idea for the moment. This was still so new and he was risking so much more than a mere girlfriend if he screwed this up at all. He was a scientist by nature, not just by trade and it made him conscious of variables and calculated risk and this was a huge one. If things didn't work out for whatever reason, Fitz wasn't sure if he'd make it without Jemma being somewhere close by in his life. Still... she loved him. The grin faded a little, but only to a bashful smile, a blush spreading over his fair skin. "Y' don' cook a' all for jus' anyone," he said, teasing a bit, "Only me... well, an' the team, when they're behavin', I suppose."

"They do behave, on occasion," she said, releasing her hold around his neck and running her hands down over his collarbone before navigating back around the island. Her feet dragged a little as Fitz’s gravity threatened to pull her back to him. It had been three weeks. Three weeks without him there, and she’d thought it would be forever.

She turned the heat back up under the potatoes and cracked open the oven to check the meat loaf.

It was another thirty minutes before she finished cooking, and with Fitz cleaning up and prepping, there wasn’t much left to do but eat it. The balsamic glaze on the meat loaf sent a flood of saliva into her mouth, and she wasn’t certain it was quite safe to leave it unattended near Fitz, who seemed to have trouble keeping his fingers out of the pan fried chard.

"Jemma!" Fitz sulked a bit when she smacked his hand away from the dish for a third time, but he sighed and spooned another serving onto his plate instead of picking out of the pan. "I still canna figure ou' how y' do this. I've followed your recipes before an' it never comes ou' righ'." He'd missed this, sitting around with Jemma during their downtime and nattering at each other over a meal or through a movie marathon.

He finally admitted to being full and helped Jemma tuck the leftovers away. Suddenly more than a little tongue tied, Fitz resorted to default FitzSimmons behavior, "So, y' missed the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who. I havena watched i' yet." He'd downloaded it the morning after it aired, but couldn't bring himself to watch it without Jemma.

She nodded, taking both his hands and pulling them around her as she moved down the hallway toward his room. “I can’t wait to see Tennant again. I know you’re anxious too.” She keyed in the code he’d set on his door after the shaving-cream incident, knowing immediately that it would be GALLIFREY, and that she was probably the only person who could figure it out.

"Y’ know my password," he blinked in surprise when she confidently punched in the series of letters and the door hissed open. Fitz followed her inside, shaking his head, "I guess I am a bi' predictable if y' know me well enou'." Still, it made him consider changing it, not because he didn't trust her, but rather to see if she would be as successful at figuring out another one.

She snorted. “You only have a few you use, and when you change them up, you just change up some of the letters for numbers. I was going to replace the I with a 1 and the E with a 3 if that didn’t work. I remember that used to be your cell phone combination at the academy.” Her stomach dropped a little when the door closed behind them, sealing them away from the rest of the empty bus.

She’d known she was alone with him before, but somehow being out in the open on the bus, it had felt like a different kind of alone. The kind of alone where you’re the only two people in a public space, which could be entered at any moment by someone else. The kind of alone where there were probably cameras all over, recording everything.

This was a different kind of alone. A more behind-closed-doors alone. The kind of alone where there was a password no one else could probably guess separating them from an empty public space. The kind of alone where everything was familiar, and quiet, and snug.

Suddenly, she just wanted to curl up on his bed and sleep. Absorb his smell and his warmth and the fact that she was finally home. She hadn’t realized she’d stopped moving, staring blankly at the room as she absorbed it like matter into a collapsing star.

He scowled, then smirked. This definitely called for a new set of passwords for his secured accounts and places. It'd be a new, playful game between them, one more in a long history of friendly challenges. Fitz was already thinking of new options when he realized she'd stilled. 

"Jem?" Fitz wasn't sure what the sudden shift of her expression meant. Jemma looked lost, the amused expression on her face abruptly faded to an empty space of pale skin, her freckles standing out starkly against it. His heart turned over in his chest and Fitz reached to take her hand. "Hey... wha's wrong?"

She swallowed at the lump suddenly aching in her throat and shook her head, trying and failing to force a smile. “No, nothing. It’s…” she sucked in a breath and blew it back out, closing her eyes to fight back the sting. “I’m just reabsorbing. It hasn’t all hit me yet, I don’t think.” A tear squeezed past her lashes, but she scrubbed it away with her palm. “It’s not bad. I’m not upset. I’m just…processing it. I didn’t-” her breath hitched a little, and she held it for a second to still the sudden feeling that she was going to get the hiccups. “-I didn’t-” she let the breath out slowly, glad there were at least no more tears slipping out. “-think I’d ever be here again. Ugh,” she scrubbed at her eyes again, then winced. “I think I need to take out my contacts.”

Fitz' other hand hovered in midair for a moment before stroking down over her hair. "Is okay... i' will take a li'l while before things feel normal again." He glanced around his small room and nodded toward the bed, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. "Why don' you ge' settled. I'll go ge' the case for your contacts."

He slipped out of his room and down the hall to Jemma's, quickly punching in her current password, the chemical formula for sugar, C12H22O11. After a moment's thought, he tucked the case into his pocket and collected a small stack of her belongings: her pillows and the well-worn patchwork quilt she'd had as long as he'd known her, the comfortable t-shirt and fleece pants she used as pajamas.

Hurrying back to his room, he hoped she'd done as he asked and made herself comfortable. Fitz was a little worried that he'd open the door and find her still standing in the middle of the room with that lost expression on her face. 

She shook herself when he left, then gave into the desire to snuggle up in covers that smelled like him. She spilled the laces on May’s boots, pulled back Fitz’s blankets and got in bed, moving a pillow or two into her corner spot and snuggling back against them. She shivered, rolling the cuffs of Coulson’s red and white pinstripe striped dress shirt down to her wrists. A hiccup jarred her, clenching her abs suddenly, and she gave a soft curse just as Fitz reappeared through the door with an arm full of her things.

"I just knew I was going to get the bloody hiccups," she whined.

He frowned across the space between them. Fitz knew all too well what the hiccups meant. Easing himself down on the edge of the bed, he offered her the stack of things from her room along with the case for her contacts. "I though'... y' migh' wan' these..." Fitz explained, setting them down next to her. She seemed so fragile, huddled there in the corner of his bed, even though Jemma was one of the strongest people he knew. Watching her for a moment, he struggled with what to say and finally settled on the simplest thing, "How can I help?"

She reached out and took his hand. “You are helping,” she said. “Just be with me. Don’t worry too much—I’m okay. I’m back, so I’m going to be fine. I just need to-” hiccup “-hell. Readjust. Get back to normal.” She squeezed his hand again and let go. “Well, mostly normal. There have been one or two changes I don’t mind keeping.”

She reached for the pile of things and shifted up onto her knees. Her leggings were comfortable enough, but the t-shirt was most definitely more comfortable than the stiff dress shirt. Her hands went to her collar, but she looked up at Fitz. She didn’t mind the idea of removing her shirt in front of him, which surprised her a little.

Maybe all the time spent naked in front of strangers over the past few weeks had inured her to the idea of being less than fully-covered around people who actually cared for her. Then again, Fitz might have a fit of chivalry and freak out. He might not be ready to see what of her tattoo was visible around the sports bra she’d been wearing, which was easier on the healing skin than what she normally wore.

She stood up, turning her back to him, letting him decide if he wanted to turn his back or not.

Fitz wasn't going to watch, but he remembered her earlier comment about the tattoos and couldn't help himself. He sucked in a breath as the dress shirt slid down her shoulders, revealing thick lines of dark ink. After his research on Yakuza tattoos, he had an idea of what the final product would have looked like, but he hadn't expected they'd have done so much, so soon. She was still close enough to touch and he did so, hesitantly tracing one of the patterns with his fingers. "Is no wonder they had y' on painkillers. This mus' ha' been terrible."

"It took hours," she said. "I don’t recommend it. It does have me curious, though, what the needle ones are like. I imagine they hurt less than the hand-tapped variety. Probably one of the reasons they still do it the old-fashioned way. Rite of passage and all that."

She shivered a little under his touch, swallowing as a ripple of unfamiliar insecurity shuddered up her back. She’d never had body issues—always been slim, curvy enough to be comfortable, and any little thing that annoyed her never had enough of an effect to make her self-conscious. All the same, she never wore revealing clothes, just as a style, and the only person whose opinion really mattered was the one whose hands were now tracing the designs.

"I haven’t seen them," she said, fiddling with Coulson’s shirt, turning the sleeves right-side out. "Are they awful?"

"They're no' awful," Fitz said. He could almost hear the self-consciousness in her voice. He jerked his fingers back when her shoulders tightened and hunched, not wanting to make her more uncomfortable. He didn't have a mirror in here for her to use, but he did have his phone. "They're no awful, there's just a _lo'_ o' them," he repeated softly. "Whoever designed these was qui' the artis'. I can take a picture, if y' wan' t' see?" It was carefully phrased as a question.

He pulled his hand away, and even though she believed him when he said they weren’t awful, the insecurity already winding around her heart clenched. They weren’t awful, but he didn’t want to touch them. Might not want to touch her now that they were a part of her. She knew it was stupid, but the trembling wasn’t a response she could control. It seemed to be coming straight from her core, where there was still something raw and scared she’d thrust into shadow, believing she’d never come home.

She shook her head. She couldn’t take seeing the thing that had made him pull away. Instead, she fussed with her soft v-neck and pulled it over her head, only to find that a bit of the tattoo that spilled over her collarbone still showed.

She was trembling so hard he could see it and Fitz felt helpless, not knowing what was wrong. When the t-shirt slithered down into place over her body, he reached out and gently drew her back into his lap where he sat on the edge of the bed, pulling her in close. "I'm sorry I touched wi'out askin'. Maybe one day when y' are more comfortable, you'll le' me ge' a better look a' those," he murmured, trying to be reassuring. The tattoos certainly weren't ugly. It just made him uncomfortable knowing they'd been placed there without her consent. It wasn't quite as bad as rape, but it was still a violation that she'd never be allowed to forget.

She turned, winding her trembling arms around his neck as she shook her head into his neck. “It w-wasn’t that. It…god. I don’t know, Fitz. I’m being stupid, and I know I’m being stupid, but I can’t stop thinking that you might not…” she couldn’t finish the sentence, knowing how stupid it was, but unable to shake the horrible feeling of it clenching her heart. “M-my grandad always said that…that tattoos on women w-were repulsive.”

"Well, tha's his opinion," Fitz scowled, "They're no' repulsive." He understood now and clutched her closer. It was easier to be honest when she wasn't looking at him, without the pressure of those brown eyes that could see right through him. Especially now that those last few walls between them were down and he was more than a little terrified at them both being so vulnerable. "They're beautiful; _you're_ beautiful. The part I dinna like is tha' you didna choose t' pu' them there. I'm no' okay wi' people doin' hurtful things t' y'."

"I told you it was stupid," she said against his shoulder. "But…I needed to hear that. I wasn’t listening to myself."

Fitz curved a hand over the back of her neck, fingers soothing the tense muscles there. “Is okay. Is been a long couple o’ weeks, I’d be more surprised if y’ were actin’ completely normal,” he reminded her. His other hand fiddled with the hem of her t-shirt. “I’d really like t’ see, if y’ dinna mind?” 

She nodded into his neck, taking a few seconds to get her head back on before standing up between his knees and turning her back to him. She pulled her shirt over her head, letting it dangle from one hand as she lowered it, then letting it drop, make a pool of powder blue on the floor.

Cool air met her skin from the hips up, and part of her wanted to get the whole thing over with and just slide down the waistband of her leggings, but Fitz would probably stop her. If he asked to see the extent of them… well, then she’d see. Even now, it was interrupted by her sports bra.

It was still the back-hook variety, for all it didn’t have underwire, and before he could protest, she reached back and unsnapped the back. She caught the fabric against her chest as the tension cut, sending it shrinking away from her back. She shrugged the straps off her shoulders, letting them catch around her elbows as she pressed the front of it to her skin.

There, that was probably a better look at the design anyway.

He honestly didn’t realize what Jemma intended until she’d already unhooked the bra and he nearly swallowed his tongue. It wasn’t as if Fitz had never gotten a peek at her over the years, but it had been flashes of skin here and there, not her entire upper body bared to him from a foot away. 

It took an embarrassingly long moment for him to focus on the tattoos and not on _her_, but when he did, Fitz couldn’t help reaching out to touch again. His fingers skimmed over the stylized lines and figures, cherry blossoms and clouds and a sinuous dragon entwined with the traditional Japanese sunrise pattern. If he closed his eyes, he’d still be able to trace them, the inked figures slightly raised from Jemma’s fair skin. He wasn’t sure if that was because they were still healing or a product of the old-style tattooing method. 

“You should really look a’ these, Jem,” he said quietly, leaned in close enough to peer at the intricate details that his breath washed over her skin. “I really don’ think they’re wha’ you think.” He gently grasped her hips and urged her to turn, to let him see the whole thing. 

His fingers had been enough of relief on their own, and she’d closed her eyes under his examination of the healing area. When his breath clouded against her skin, though, she lost some of the tension in her arms and stomach, relaxing without meaning to. He spun her around, and she didn’t really tighten her grip on the sports bra, letting him get a look at the ink spilling down her shoulders and just arcing over one collarbone, the intricate lines of a cherry blossom branch and faint chemical compound structures twining toward her heart. The dragon’s tail slid around her opposite hip, just barely rising over the hem of her leggings. “At least they personalized some of it,” she said, hesitating just a little at the look on his face.

It was the way he looked when he got a particularly well-designed machine in his hands, and was too busy admiring it to take it apart just yet. Her skin went a little hot, a soft clench in her belly as the intensity of that look was turned on her.

Now that he saw the chemical structure framed on its own by the top of her bra, Fitz recognized that there were more of them on her back, entwined so skillfully into the overall design he hadn’t recognized them for what they were. “I tol’ you, they’re beautiful,” he murmured. She still looked hesitant, so he reached up to pull her down for a kiss, his hands framing her face gently. “The tattoos dinna change anythin’, Jem,” he whispered between kisses, “I still love you.” 

His words hit her with a wave of goosebumps over her skin, and the way he was kissing her made it too difficult and frustrating to remain standing. She sank to his knee again, letting go of the bra with one hand so she could brace it on his chest. “I love you—too,” she gasped, because he was doing a very, very good job of making her short of breath

One hand skimmed down her body and around her waist, his callused palm splayed low on her back to hold her steady while the other tangled in her hair to brace her against the warm pressure of his mouth on hers. She could have died and he’d never have gotten to tell her he loved her, never gotten to experience any of this with her. Fitz realized just how lucky he was to get this second chance and he was going to take advantage of it. 

At some point, he tipped back on the bed, bringing her down with him and sliding his mouth to her ear to tease it and her neck with soft nips of his teeth. 

She went with him, forgetting about anything but the way his mouth on her neck was making her gasp and twitch. He was nice and solid under her, just wide enough to support her. She stopped thinking about holding onto the sports bra, letting it get pinned between them as she clenched her fingers in the bedspread next to his shoulder.

A particularly well-placed bite elicited a high-pitched whimper, and she felt her whole body contract, legs tangling around his. “Fitz,” she said, not knowing how to ask him for what she wanted, or even exactly what it was he could do.

All the sudden Fitz froze, his body going tense under hers. He swore softly under his breath, his mouth still pressed against her skin. “Someone jus’ opened th’ cargo bay door,” he explained, “Feel tha?” There was a faint vibration running though the Bus from the movement. He pressed his forehead against her shoulder, desperately trying to get himself back under control. 

Something blank and wonderful had washed over her mind, but fell away rudely at Fitz’s sudden tension, at the words that slowly worked their meaning into her brain. His hands on her stilled, and she felt him withdraw, mastering himself.

It was like something had ripped out of her chest. One second, there was relief, and not a little desperation for the comfort of his hands and his body under her, for the proof that he wasn’t repelled by the black stains on her body. The wall of ice that had helped her survive while in Dr. Sakurai’s possession had started to crack and melt away. She’d just started to admit to herself how frightened she’d been, to glimpse the possible future of never seeing anyone she loved again, and let it be soothed away by the reality that that future hadn’t happened. The next second, the situation broke, and she wasn’t ready.

Maybe it was because she was overwhelmed, but her jaw clenched, and she squeezed her eyes shut hard, trying to staunch the frustrated tears that pushed out.

It wasn’t fair. The team was coming back. It was timing. It wasn’t about them. There was nothing Fitz could do to change it, and it would be horribly awkward for everyone involved—no matter how much they probably already suspected of the two scientists—to expect a happy reunion and get a silent ship with a conspicuously locked door.

But it felt like having something ripped away. She controlled her breathing as well as she could, rolling off Fitz before remembering her bra was not attached. She sat up, one arm hugged across her chest, and pressed the other hand to her hot face, swallowing convulsively.

Fitz had seen her have a panic attack before, and she was showing all the signs that another one was imminent. “Jemma. Jem, hey, look at me,” Fitz said gently, drawing her attention to him. “Is okay. Listen, I ca’ keep them away if y’ want. Tell them you’re no’ ready an’ are in here restin’. Or we can go ou’ an’ meet them. I don’ gi’ a damn if they know abou’ us. Wha’s the wors’ they can do? Fire us? We both had other job offers before SHIELD recruited us, we can always go somewhere else.” He cupped her face in his hands, voice still soft, but fierce, “I’m no lettin’ y’ go now, so tha’s tha’. Jus’ tell me how y’ want t’ handle i’.” 

If anything could have calmed her down, it was knowing he’d follow her away from S.H.I.E.L.D. if necessary. She leaned into his shoulder, hiccupping violently a few times, arm still crossed tight across her chest as she fought with the conflicting questions. She’d felt ready for that a few minutes ago. Now she was feeling vulnerable again, and a little exposed with the knowledge that there were others aboard the ship, and Fitz was sitting up, in his right mind again, and might feel awkward.

She shouldn’t even be worrying about that, she told herself. Something deep in her gut told her he was there for the long-haul, and this moment would not be defined in their memories by how well she managed to conceal her chest. She had a feeling the tattoo, the relationship, the reunion in general was the most important.

He might remember the chest part too, though. He was male, after all.

"I need a bit," she said, after another hiccup. "Get rid of the hiccups. Find a sh-" hiccup "shirt that doesn’t, you know…show them."

“Alrigh’, we can do tha’,” he agreed easily. Fitz leaned forward to brush a kiss against her mouth, hesitating a moment before he leaned down and kissed her shoulder, right over the tattoo. “Why don’ y’ pu’ tha’ back on while I find y’ another shirt?” he suggested, giving the trailing end of her bra a tug.

Fitz quickly found her a t-shirt with a crew neck that would fit up to her neck and handed it over. “I’m goin’ to go on ou’. Take your time. They’ll still be there when you’re ready, okay?” 

She dressed in Fitz’s shirt, pulled May’s boots back on over her socks and leggings, and checked the effect. Well, there were a few bruises on her neck that were a little suspicious, but she doubted anyone was going to care. She found the contacts case in Fitz’s jacket and took them out, searching his bedside table for a pair of glasses she knew she’d left in here a week or so before her abduction.

The rest of the team was surprised to see only Fitz in the lounge when they came in, but when he mentioned that she was changing her into more comfortable clothes, they all seemed to accept that at face value. Well, except Skye, who was impatient as usual, fidgety and pacing the edges of the room as they waited for Jemma to appear. 

Fitz finally got up and tapped on the door to his room. “Jemma?” he called out, and after a second tap he went in, not sure what he’d find.

She was sitting on his bed, cross-legged, trying to wrangle her hair into a braid without it catching in her glasses. “Do you know if I’ve got a hair tie in here?” She asked, a little nervous at the sound of voices. “Is Skye about to chew her own arm off?”

"Yes, an' yes," he chuckled. Fitz pulled a hair tie out of a drawer - he'd been keeping a stash of them forever, because she was always losing or breaking them. He gently swatted her hands away and deftly plaited her hair forward over her shoulder, conveniently hiding the small marks he'd left on her neck. "I think Skye will hack her way through my password if y' dinna ge' ou' there soon. Coulson too. Y' know he takes i' personally when anythin' happens t' one o' us."

She smiled, noting the placement of her braid with a little bit of satisfaction that they were on the same page about at least a few things. When he’d finished, she readjusted the tortoise-shell glasses and stood up, lifting her hands out to the side and dropping her arms again. “I guess it’s time to go appease the family.”

"I'll follow your lead," he said quietly, "Wi' wha'ever y' decide t' tell. Abou’ Japan, or us, or wha’ever. I dinna think anyone will notice if I stay quie’ righ’ now." Fitz caught her hand and gave it a soft squeeze before opening the door, stepping aside to let her through first. He had a feeling that if he didn't stick right with her, she wouldn't come out until morning, at least. 

She preceded him toward the ship’s bow and the sound of nervous murmurs. She’d obviously seen May and Ward, who’d been the ones to pluck her from Toushougu shrine, and Coulson had been present at her debriefing, and passed along the bundle of clothing he’d collected between himself and May.

Skye was the only one she hadn’t yet seen, and she really did want to see her. Over the months they’d traveled together, it was nice to have another girl around, even if Skye didn’t take much of an interest in science, she was remarkably sensitive and sincere. Sometimes a little too honest or prying, but so genuine that Jemma couldn’t ever bring herself to be too upset at her for it.

Fitz’s presence at her back both shepherded her forward and gave her confidence. This was her team. All would be fine. And even if it wasn’t, Fitz would be there to hold her together.

"Simmons!" Skye was on her, hugging her without regard to the still-sore skin, shivering and smelling like hairspray and gardenias and not a little bit like Ward’s aftershave He must have been holding her back bodily—that or comforting her.

"Hey," she whispered, even as Ward and Coulson moved forward in an attempt to remove Skye’s arms from Jemma’s back. Jemma wound her arms around her friend’s ribs to keep her there, squeezing her eyes shut as she held onto the other girl and felt relief crash through her again. Her friend. Her best friend besides Fitz.

Fitz brushed his hand against the small of her back, out of everyone else’s sight, as he passed by the hugging girls to sit at the end of the couch. He turned so he was in the corner between the back and arm, keeping an eye on the rest of the room. Coulson looked proudly paternal, May was inscrutable as always, Ward looked torn between rolling his eyes and giving Jemma a hug of his own. Skye was still clinging to Jemma, her dark hair shielding her face from view, but Jemma didn’t look upset so Fitz held his tongue. 

Jemma extricated herself from Skye after a moment, accepted a quick, one-armed squeeze from Ward, and made a bee line for Fitz. No one seemed to question the gravity that drew her to him. She sat just in front of where his leg was crooked against the back of the couch, giving her the option of leaning against him if she wanted.

There really wasn’t any need to tell anyone about the shift in their relationship. If they hadn’t noticed already, they would. She didn’t think she and Fitz were going to be obnoxious about it in public, but she wasn’t going to try to keep her hands off him if she wanted to touch him, no matter who was in the room. Not after the opportunity had almost been taken away from her.

She took a deep breath, looking around at her surrogate family. “I know some of you have questions…”

Coulson shook his head, “I heard enough during the debriefing. It’s your decision what to tell, Jemma. I’m sure your teammates will respect whatever choice you make in that regard.” The look he gave Skye along with those words was sharp and very pointed. The hacker looked like she wanted to say something, but Ward gave her a look of his own and she made a face before falling silent. 

“I would like to know what they were looking for,” May said quietly. “Why did they take you?” 

He could almost _see_ the tension vibrating through Jemma. Fitz moved his leg just enough to let it press against her back, a silent reminder that he was right there. Without being certain of whether she was ready for them to be public, he wasn’t going to make any more obvious gestures unless Jemma initiated them. 

She took a deep breath, rubbing a little at her jaw before answering. “Dr. Sakurai, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, used to be called Dr. Akiko Yamaguchi—one of the scientists working at SciOps in the late nineties. She was heavily involved on a team trying to replicate the supersoldier serum. While they weren’t as violently unsuccessful as Dr. Banner, there were some casualties that eventually caused her more experimental branch of the operation to be shut down. After that, she accepted an arranged marriage to a man Ryuunosuke Sakurai, and left S.H.I.E.L.D., ostensibly to work in a lab in Japan.”

She took another breath—she’d looked up a lot of the information on Dr. Sakurai after the mission, checking facts and making connections. “What S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t have listed in her public file, but I’m certain they knew, is that she was the daughter of one of the underbosses to the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate, and upon his death, she inherited the position and the considerable wealth of that branch, which she subsequently funneled into a privately-owned lab dedicated to continuing her research.

"What she wanted wasn’t so much information, you see. Now that we have recent biological test results and samples for Captain America, she wanted a S.H.I.E.L.D. scientist, someone with current knowledge who was capable of working alone. I’m not sure how she got my name, since we weren’t contemporaries. I wasn’t even at the academy when she left. But she did. She found my name, knew everything about me. Knew exactly where to aim to make me behave.

"She seemed to think her methods were justified by the potential results—an army of super soldiers defending earth against attack. Of course, they would be chosen by the gumi. Somehow I doubt they intended to perform the same sorts of character tests that the Americans did."

Ward scowled at this new information. “This isn’t the first time one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s assets has dropped off the radar and gotten up to no good. Us operative types can be dangerous - look at Akela Amadour - but the scientists are worse. They’ve got information and know how to apply it. Why aren’t we doing a better job of tracking them?” The specialist sounded frustrated and more than a little angry. 

“I would like to know the answer to that myself,” May sounded thoughtful, but also vaguely displeased. It was hard to tell with her. “I worked with Akiko Yamaguchi. She was more than a little fanatical about her project. Tried to recruit me more than once and did not respond well when I declined. S.H.I.E.L.D. should have known she would never let that research go.” 

Fitz spoke up from his corner of the couch, “I dinna know abou’ everyone else, bu’ I figured when I signed up tha’ even if I lef’, I’d be under surveillance o’ some sor’ for the res’ o’ my life. Y’ mean t’ tell me tha’s no’ true? S.H.I.E.L.D. doesna check? Tha’s crazy.” 

Jemma shook her head. “She was under surveillance, but the Japanese government is funny about dealing with yakuza groups. With the exception of outright violence, they’re left alone. SHIELD’s in with the Japanese government is pretty much a dead end. The surveillance available is all vague. They knew he married. Knew she was yakuza. According to her file SHIELD ran risk assessment on her before they ever recruited her and decided they’d rather have someone of her talents and connections working with rather than apart from the organization.”

She felt a bit new energized now. Talking, decoding, working to fix something. Those were the things that Jemma felt secure with.

"From what I saw in the files, it was clear she was running a lab, which SHIELD expected, but the security was so thoroughly vetted and loyal it would have taken…well…May it Ward to get in, and before my abduction, there was no hint Dr. Sakurai had anything even illegal going on. Of course there was the same sort of organized crime involvement as ever, but the government wanted no part in stopping that, and SHIELD has more global issues to deal with, apparently, or they’d have tried to force the prime minister. Also, Skye, pull up Akiko Sakurai née Yamaguchi’s recruitment file: there’s an agreement of non-involvement signed by SHIELD’s previous director and the head of Yamaguchi’s-gumi."

Even Coulson startled at that. “I didn’t catch that in the debriefing. Jemma, are you saying that S.H.I.E.L.D. signed away their rights to take action to prevent Sakurai from continuing her research? What fool didn’t consider the possibility that she’d have access to highly sensitive information that she could then transfer elsewhere? It’s not as if S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn’t have known that the Yakuza are dangerous.” He circled the couch to stand behind Skye’s chair, watching the hacker navigate the databases where S.H.I.E.L.D. kept all their secrets, legally this time, since she was using the Bus’ network under Coulson’s supervision.

Fitz frowned, muttering half to himself. “Someone else knew abou’ this. Fury answers to a Council, no’? They had t’... If Jemma or I asked for an agreemen’ like tha’, someone would wan’ t’ know _why_. Is like admittin’ y’ know you’re goin’ t’ leave and y’ will be up t’ no good when y’ do.”

"Consider this, though," May said. "S.H.I.E.L.D. had a notoriously difficult time getting any kind of foothold in Japan; it has no military, and that makes the government wary of concessions. There’s not a base any closer than South Korea or Taiwan. The yakuza crime syndicate has a pervasive history all over the country, and with the government’s unspoken agreement to ignore them, they have influence in everything from arms dealing to local government to dog breeding. S.H.I.E.L.D. might have been attempting to gain a foothold in Japan through Yamaguchi. Taking a risk in order to get a result."

"Yeah, well it was a risk for a reason," Ward said. He gestured at Jemma. "This is that reason."

She tensed. “No,” she said, and something about her tone must have been angry, because everyone looked at her, startled. “The reason is still in that lab. They’ve managed to improve on the formula to an alarming degree—the only issue is they’re having trouble stabilizing it post-injection, and the current results are a bit alarming. It causes nearly-instantaneous mitosis of the muscle cells, but there’s no controlling it. The subjects…well, imagine a peep in a microwave and I think you’ll get the picture.” She shivered, but didn’t lean toward Fitz. She needed to talk on her own for a bit, to confirm that she could handle herself without help for a little bit. “I did what I could to make it non-lethal, but I didn’t want to be too successful. I just…I couldn’t watch them keep testing it. Of everything, that’s the part that…was the hardest to deal with. Knowing I probably could have figured out a way to stabilize the serum, but not doing it. Letting people die because their hearts were crushed by their own body.”

Fitz cringed at her description. He didn't claim to have more than a fraction of Jemma's expertise in biology or chemistry, but he understood enough to know just how horrific that reaction would be to watch. His stomach spun just thinking about it. 

His fingers itched to reach out to her, worried by the carefully expressionless set of Jemma’s face, but she was still virtually ignoring his presence behind her. 

“You did what you could. What you had to,” Coulson reassured her. “We can tear this apart looking at details all we want, but it won’t change the ultimate result. This happened. As far as we know, the lab and the work within it was destroyed. S.H.I.E.L.D. has other teams who will be investigating further and we will be returning to mobile response activities.” 

Coulson glanced around at each of them in turn, “There will also be new security protocols. Ward, I expect you to coordinate with Fitz on this. It was too easy for them to get on the Bus and out without anyone being alerted. That needs to change. Figure out how to make it happen.” He refocused on Jemma, but his words were still meant for the other two men, “I also want at least one panic button in the lab that activates some sort of lockdown procedure.” 

“Yes, sir,” Ward replied instantly. While he and Fitz had their share of disagreements, Ward respected his skills as an engineer and wasn’t going to argue with anything that would make his team safer. 

Fitz was glad for Coulson’s assignment, but hated that it was necessary. At least it would hopefully prevent any more intrusions, and more importantly, make Jemma feel safer aboard the Bus. She’d only been back a few hours, but he could easily imagine that Jemma would be nervous for some time. Fitz jiggled his leg behind her, bumping her lightly with his knee to get her attention and silently ask ‘are you okay?’ with his quirked eyebrow. 

She glanced at Fitz, and the question in his blue eyes tightened her throat. She’d clenched her fingers in the hem of the borrowed shirt as she spoke, and carefully unclenched them now, her nails pulling a little painfully from where she’d dug them into her palm. She leaned back against his knee, her shoulders surrendering some of their rigidity.

"Thank you," she said to the room at large. "And thank you in advance for being patient with me. I’m…going to be fine. I just need some time to process it all."

"You got this," Skye said. "And when you don’t, we got it for you. It’s gonna be okay."

“I think we should let Jemma get settled back in and get some rest,” Coulson said firmly. “There will be more time for us all to talk later.” May nodded at him and quietly slipped out of the room, heading toward the cockpit. 

Ward hesitated for a moment, then made a vague motion toward Skye. “What she said,” he agreed. “It’ll get better with time. C’mon, rookie. You’ve been slacking on your workouts.” The least he could do was to occupy Skye and keep her from pestering the biochemist too much. 

Fitz’ focus was still all for Jemma. He knew the others were moving around them, but his eyes were fixed on her as the center of his universe. Even Coulson’s request to ramp up the security protocols was on a side process in his head, running in the background. Jemma was the priority, and making sure she came through this whole. He straightened from his slouch against the arm of the couch, putting him close to her side when he repeated the earlier question in a soft voice, for only her to hear, “Are you okay?” 

"Of course not," she whispered back, but there was no bite to her voice. She turned her face to his, pressing her forehead against his chin, fingers curling gingerly into his shirt. A wave of true exhaustion hit her, and she felt her throat tighten a little as she leaned into Fitz’s arms, ignoring the way Coulson, who was still lingering on his phone, glanced at them and quickly away, as if pretending not to see.

"I haven’t slept well," she admitted. "I can’t manage to stay asleep."

‘The hell with Coulson’ was the first thing that passed through his mind. Fitz slipped his arms around her for support, but her words distracted him. “Is no’ like I ha’ been sleepin’ much, either. Is a little early, bu’ why don’ we go lie down and we’ll figure ou’ th’ res’ later on,” he suggested quietly. 

She cut her gaze a little nervously to Coulson, who had turned his back to them, ostensibly listening to messages. She nodded and stood, not bothering to disguise it when she reached for his hand, curling her fingers against his palm rather than threading them through his fingers. She wanted his hand shielding hers, covering it, holding it safe from the possibility of slipping away from him again.

They strode back to the bunks, and she avoided looking at hers. She still wasn’t ready to face the sight of the room she’d written that letter to him in, a gun pointed to her head as she packed and fought to keep composure, preparing to leave for the last time and never see anyone again. No, she wasn’t ready to face that room yet. It would be too surreal.

Fitz quickly tapped in his password and let her slide past him into his bunk. The sun had gone down outside, leaving the small room quiet and dark when he closed the door behind them, shutting out the rest of the world. He’d noticed the way Jemma flinched away from her own space and was glad he’d thought to fetch her things earlier, not consciously realizing she had those memories to face as well. 

Her small hand was still wrapped in his and he squeezed it, his thumb rubbing soothingly in her palm. “You can stay in here wi’ me,” Fitz broke the silence with his quiet promise, “As long as y’ wan’.” Forever, even. He couldn’t quite make himself say that yet though. Not when she was still so shaken by her experience. 

"Thanks," she said, wasting no time in removing her boots. Her hand hesitated a second at the button of the borrowed shirt. Would it be weird to suddenly strip down to her leggings and bra again, even if that was how she wanted to sleep? Possibly. But then again, with so much bearing down on her mind, the worry about that seemed to slide off and plink to the ground, unable to find foothold among all the other worries.

She pulled off the shirt, folded back the covers, and climbed into his bed, tucking herself in her corner. It seemed ages ago when she’d cuddled with him there, watching movies and mutually hating/loving the sweet torture of their relationship’s status quo. She left the blanket turned down behind her, deciding if he failed to join her, she might throw something at him. A pillow. The metallic form of Sleepy, curled upside down at the edge of the bed where he’d apparently been tinkering with it.

Fitz watched her, or at least what little he could see of her, swallowing hard when he realized how little she was wearing to bed. While it was comforting in a way, knowing she was that comfortable with him, it was also a test of his own self-control. He didn’t want to rush things but Fitz knew damned well that if Jemma turned to him tonight and asked for more, he wouldn’t be able to tell her no. He almost never could and especially not after the past three weeks. Scrubbing a hand over his jaw, he frowned. 

“I’ll be righ’ back,” Fitz murmured, heading down the hall to the shared bathroom to hurriedly shave off the couple days worth of scruff accumulated on his face, also using the delay to try and control his body’s reaction to continuing where they’d left off when the team returned earlier. He dropped the razor back into his locker and padded back into his room to crawl in with Jemma. Fitz laid close behind her and reached to curve his hand over her waist, tugging gently, “C’mere, Jem.” 

She scooted back into him, relaxing as his arm wound around her and pulled her tight back against him. She relaxed, tucked a foot back and snagged his ankle, pulling his leg between hers. She wanted him close, wanted his weight shifted against her back, a warm, solid barrier between her and the door. Her breathing slowed, and she became aware of him in more subtle ways—his heart beat, the swell and fall of his chest against her back as he breathed, the way the small of her back didn’t quite touch his stomach. They were both too thin. And how had she never noticed his arms? Hidden away beneath dress shirts, they were unexpectedly solid. She supposed he did spend a lot of time moving heavy parts to fix the bus. He was built like a willow—not in the poetic sense, but in the sense that his slenderness was the tough kind.

She snuggled back against him, let his breath on the back of her neck soothe her, and was asleep in seconds, for the first time in weeks.

Unresistant to her demands, Fitz let her mold him into whatever was most comfortable for her, but when she drifted off, he shifted around her. He carefully slipped an arm under Jemma’s neck, the other coming up from her waist to curl around her shoulder, his forearm resting between her breasts so he was clutching her upper body against him. His nose and mouth pressed against the soft skin at the join of her neck and shoulder. As tired as Fitz was, he laid there awake for quite some time before he drifted off, joining her in peaceful sleep. 

She woke herself up with a sharp gasp, sweating, heart hammering so hard it shook her whole body. There was something restraining her, an arm around her chest.

She ripped herself away and slammed into something cold and flat. The wall. She let out a short whimper and twisted around, gaze darting around as her mind fought to shrug off the shreds if dream still claiming her senses. Bodies distorted and growing, tumor-like growths ripping through skin that couldn’t grow fast enough to contain it. Eyes, being pushed forward by the swelling of the brain, popping free as their owners shrieked.

In her dream, she’d been injected. She was going to die, just like them, the stinging tattoos on her back splitting as she erupted out of her own body.

Jemma’s flailing woke Fitz almost instantly, his own more peaceful dreams rudely interrupted. Groggy and eyes cloudy with lingering sleep, it took him a bit to realize what was happening. When it did, he reached to press his hands to her face, cradling it gently. “Jemma. Jemma, look a’ me. Is okay. Wha’ever you’re seeing is no real,” he whispered to her. “Is over, Jem. You’re safe.” 

Fitz desperately wanted to pull her close and soothe her visible trembling, but he wasn’t sure if she’d let him. He slowly slid his hands down to her shoulders before pulling them back into his own personal space. “Is really okay, Jem,” he said softly, “Is no one here bu’ y’ an’ me.”

She was safe. She was with Fitz, in his room, in his bed, on the bus, shaking so hard she could hear the rattle of the sheets over her arm. Relief crashed down over her and she felt the tears slide out, dropping fast and hit onto the sheets, though she didn’t make a sound.

He pulled her back, and she went where he directed, rocking into his chest and letting him hold her. She pushed away the desire to apologize for her reactions, too horrified by the images her mind had regurgitated to feel they were unjustified.

She was so tired. Her mind screamed for sleep, but except for under the influence of the painkillers, sleep had come with a time limit and a price.

"Leo," she croaked. "I can’t sleep…"

He kept murmuring to her as she cried, arms snug around her and his head bent over hers. Fitz loosed an arm long enough to reach down and get her quilt from the end of the bed, shaking out the heavy folds and spreading it over them both. Hopefully it would help place her back in her own skin, with him on the Bus. 

When she spoke again, Fitz’ heart broke for her. She almost never called him Leo, and the sound of his name in that quiet, desperate tone tore at him. All he wanted was to fix it for her. 

Tucking her quilt and his own blanket in behind her to keep her from being chilled by the coolness of the surface, Fitz nudged Jemma up against the wall, bracketing her between it and his body. One arm still curled under her neck and cradled her head against his shoulder, but the other was now free to pet and soothe. 

“Is goin’ t’ take some time, Jem,” he whispered. “Jus’ stay wi’ me. I dinna care if y’ wake me. We can ge’ through anythin’ together.” His fingers carded through her hair in slow passes, and Fitz finally tipped his head down to kiss her.

Her mouth was wet with tears, and she felt her cheek stick to his a built with the moisture it it. The gut-deep chills were still going, but some of the reminders if panic had started to melt away against the warmth of him. Fitz was there, he was holding her, and she believed him when he said he didn’t care if she woke him. The way he was treating her made her ache, the reality of almost losing what she hadn’t even known she had settled hard in her mind. She pressed against his mouth a little harder, deepening the kiss and relaxing just a little at the hand taking softly over her scalp.

Fitz let out a quiet groan when she returned the kiss. He wasn’t even sure she was aware of the way she’d pressed her body against his at the same time, but he honestly didn’t much care. He focused intently on her, following her lead. He wouldn’t push for anything more than she was willing to give, not when she was so shaken up. Even with that, it was a relief to know that Jemma trusted him this much, that taking the next step in their relationship still felt comfortable even under the circumstances. 

She let him bring her slowly back to the world, or maybe he was bringing her out of it, into a different, surreal world where everything was all right and she was allowed to forget the people she had let die by not stabilizing the serum.

The soft groan took her a little by surprise, but the instant she heard it, she realized how she was holding herself against him, kissing him, and _of course_ he was affected by it, though he made a valiant attempt to keep himself on tighter reins.

She found she didn’t really want him to. He felt good against her, woke up her nerves and her senses, made her feel more alive. She shifted her weight onto him a bit, twining her legs with his and sweeping her tongue into the heat of his mouth.

His fingers tangled in her hair, cupping the back of Jemma’s head to deepen the kiss. Fitz let his tongue tangle with hers, a thoroughly enjoyable mock argument between them until he stroked the tip of his tongue over her bottom lip and gently set his teeth in. He’d wanted to be in this exact place for so long that it was hard to pull back and give her the choice, but he did it. Somehow, he did it.

Fitz pressed his forehead against hers, breathless and searching Jemma’s face to be sure this was really what she wanted and not some desperate, emotional plea because she was still shaken from her nightmare. 

She recognized the question on his face, and wanted to have an answer for him that was clear cut. But in truth, it wasn’t. She would have wanted him no matter what, but in this instance, with fear still nipping at the back of her mind, it felt like running. It felt like running from an open, stormy ocean into a familiar harbor, and not being able to say whether it was the safe port or the storm that made her want to cast her anchor.

"Just…hold me a while," she said. "I don’t know… I want you. I do. I just want it to be because of wanting, and not the other thing…"

It was hard to control her own desires, even as she said it. She was arching into him, and she knew she was sending mixed signals, asking him to wait with her words, begging him for more with every inch of her body. She knew it, yet she couldn’t make herself stop.

He shook his head at Jemma with a soft smile. “Dinna go off an’ star’ feelin’ guilty,” he said firmly. “Is okay.” Still, Fitz eased her onto her back and pressed into her side, one leg thrown over hers, an arm wrapped snug around Jemma’s waist . It was still torturous to his body, but it wouldn’t lend itself quite so easily to too much, too fast. 

Fitz propped himself up on his elbow and watched her. The delicate features of Jemma’s face were shadowed in the darkness but he could nearly feel the indecision. He brushed kisses over her jaw and nuzzled against her ear. “Whe’ever you’re ready,” he said quietly. “Tonigh’, tomorrow, two months… two years. I’ve waited for y’ for years already, I can be patien’.”

Something about his breath in her ear, the timbre of his voice, gravelly and low. Something about knowing he was willing to wait as long as she needed, but was ready to take her completely right now… She let out a soft whine, wriggling a little under his arm and turning her face to him. "If you’re saying all that to make it more impossible not to want you right now, it’s working," she whispered.

Fitz flushed. Not that she could see it, but the rush of heat that came with it felt like it was radiating off his skin. “I wasna tryin’ t’ change your mind,” he protested immediately. “Is up t’ you. I mean i’. Y’ jus’ go’ back from a terrible experience an’ this is new for both o’ us.” He set his hand on her hip, preventing her from closing in on him again. 

"I was teasing you," she said, fingers of one hand curling into his shirt, the other sliding around his elbow and pulling his arm around her again. "I definitely don’t want to stop this," she said, catching his lips quickly against her own, running her tongue softly along the roof of his mouth. "Or any reaction that causes. I want to feel normal again. You make me feel right, even if it’s a new sort of right. It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like it’s been this way for ages."

“I know i’ does… I feel i’ too, but you can’ ask me t’ stop wantin’ t’ take care o’ you,” he said softly, his forehead pressed against hers, warm breath washing over her skin, “Because i’ willna happen. I didna think y’ were comin’ back, Jem. I’ve been half-crazy for three weeks between no’ knowin’ or knowin’ an’ no’ bein’ able t’ do anythin’ bu’ wai’. Y’ had i’ even worse.” His brogue was thick, voice low and soft as he tried to explain. “I’ll do almos’ anythin’ y’ ask, excep’ rush this. Y’ mean too much t’ me.” The kiss he gave her then was almost painfully gentle, but more than a little of the desperation he’d felt while she was gone leaked through. 

She wanted to tease him again, to ask when he became the voice of reason…but he sort of always had been, on matters of the heart. The things Jemma ran from, he faced, and held her hand until she felt brave enough to face it too. When she’d been unable to tell her parents about being ill, he had only supported her, looking worried, reminding her without words that she needed her parents and would feel much better once she told them.

Still, his words now made her entire chest heave a little. He wasn’t going to let her run this time either, even if running meant running to him, especially if it meant running to him for the wrong reasons. More tears—she hadn’t realized she could make so many—skated down her face as she nodded, knowing he was right, that it was not the time, even if he had been the one to pose the original question. “Just…hold me then? Like I said? I need you, just to be with me.”

“Hey, wha’s all this?” Fitz slid his arm under her pillow and down to settle under her neck, the other wrapping around her back and letting their legs sort themselves into a tangle. “Wha’ did I do?” he asked, concerned. 

"Nothing, you idiot," she said, half laughing. "You’re just perfect and I can’t…believe I got this lucky. I feel like I’m getting away with something." She said, too exhausted and frightened not to tell the truth.

He rubbed his nose against hers before giving her another kiss, lingering at her mouth for the simple pleasure of doing so. “I have a lo’ o’ los’ time t’ make up for,” he laughed quietly, “I’ve only been thinkin’ abou’ this for years.” 

"So do I," she said, reaching up to touch her fingers to his face, almost in wonder. "It’s almost like the moment when we first start working on a project after thinking and talking about it for so long." She brushed his hair back from his forehead, noticing that his cheek under the edge of her palm was smooth. So that’s why he’d ducked out earlier. "So, question…" she said softly. "Did you shave because you were hoping I would kiss you more, because that’s something that I think I can probably manage."

“Maybe a little,” he admitted, leaning into her touch. It still amazed him that even with the hesitance because of recent events, this felt so _normal_ otherwise. Had they always been so close to being in a relationship? Fitz hadn’t thought so, but apparently all the people who’d teased him and Jemma about behaving like a couple had been right. He made a little face and returned his attention to Jemma, “I’m okay wi’ more kissin’ tonigh’.” 

"Well, that’s a relief," she said. "Because I don’t think I will ever get tired of it."

Fitz pressed his lips to hers, “Me either.” Within a few minutes they were oblivious to the rest of the world there in his small room on the Bus.

**Author's Note:**

> From an RP thread on Tumblr between sakurazawa (http://homemadepestoaioli.tumblr.com) and aching_for_distance (http://leo-simmons.tumblr.com). Come follow us, if you aren't already!


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